A scan of headlines from the past week makes clear that the 7th annual AP Report to the Nation, released Wednesday, has garnered a great deal of attention. Across the nation, states are either crowing that more of their graduates are earning a "3" or above on the exam, or lamenting that their status has fallen from previous years.
But while providing high school students with a taste of college-level expectations through AP coursework (and hopefully inching them closer to a college degree via credit earned through an AP exam), what seems to have been lost in the headlines is this: Many students do not complete their degree at the institution their postsecondary education started at, and many states lack consistent policies across institutions in the number and type of credits students earn for a passing score on an AP exam. So when a student who received AP credit from the institution s/he started out at is forced to retake a course (or receives only "elective" credit) at the institution s/he transfers to, the value of AP as a means to reduce families' tuition costs and students' time-to-degree is diminished.
As college completion gains momentum through various initiatives nationwide, let's hope more states adopt policies standardizing credit by exam equivalencies and common passing scores for such exams as AP, as Kentucky did in landmark legislation in 2010.
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