Advanced Placement Participation in Michigan
Advanced Placement is considered by many to be the "gold standard" in helping to prepare our high school students for the challenges they await at college.
I began trying to research the topic in order to benchmark the performance of Rochester Community Schools, but quickly found that data was not available. In early 2005 I asked if the district administrators would try to collect data from neighboring districts, but was told it was too much work.
So, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I collected data from approximately 100 school districts across Michigan.
As I had suspected, Rochester did have room for improvement.
But more than that, I learned that Michigan as a state was sadly lacking.
A PDF copy of my report can be found on my website:
Advanced Placement Participation in Michigan (2005)
==> Mike.
3 comments:
Thank you for your research. However, as a parent of a senior who has taken too many AP classes to count, I would like to know how many districts add a bump to the grade a student receives in an AP class. Many students in this district shy away from AP classes when they know it could have an impact on their GPA thus the possibility of lowering the ever-important class rank! It would be interesting to evaluate the senior class top students and see how many would change if indeed this district would place value on our true top students who push themselves by taking AP and Honor classes. If would also be interesting to see ACT scores and GPA comparisons since this years seniors were required to take the ACT last year.
Sadly, Rochester is not one of the districts that "weights" AP grades. I think it's rather unfortunate, and I support the idea of weighting grades for AP classes.
I did collect AP data for the 2006-07 school year, and was hoping to compare it to the ACT's College Readiness Benchmark. The State of Michigan never released that data, and I haven't had time -- yet -- to go back to compare the AP results to the ACT score. Stay tuned!
I can tell you that my child ranked in the 98% on the ACT and has taken many AP classes BUT is barely in the top 20% based on class rank -
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