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 07/16/09
- Socialist America Sinking, by Patrick J. Buchanan
Thoughts On Advanced Placement Testing…And Sotomayor
By Steve Sailer
Last
week, all across America, high school students who took
Advanced Placement (AP) tests in May began receiving their
scores in the mail.
 So
now is a good time to take an in-depth look at this rite of
passage. It’s grown remarkably popular. The number of AP
tests taken rose from one million in
1998 to approaching 2.7 million in
2008.
This article serves both
parents
wondering what their kids’ AP test strategy should look
like, and citizens wanting to learn more about testing so
they can evaluate Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s anti-objective
examination decision in the
Ricci case.
(Her Senate hearings begin Monday).
Although the College Board is responsible
for both the SAT and the Advanced Placement tests, the APs
have, so far, largely escaped criticism for
"disparate impact”
i.e.
minorities doing badly. That’s
largely because few have bothered to look as rigorously
at the numbers as we’ll do here.
In recent decades, the AP tests have grown
extensive (three dozen different subjects are now offered,
ranging from
U.S. History to
Statistics
to
Studio Art: 3-D Design). It’s becoming quite feasible
for smart, diligent students to accumulate so many college
credit hours in high school that they can graduate from
college in seven semesters, or even just three years. This
could potentially save tens of thousands of dollars in
tuition. At
a minimum, AP credit can provide the cushion needed to keep
a college student from having to come back for a fifth year.
Also, the pressure of the AP test can make
a student bear down and really learn the content, just as
the New Haven fire
department promotional tests drove the more
dedicated firemen to
master the material they ought to know.
Finally, in upper middle class high
schools, "AP classes"
have become wildly fashionable with parents looking for a
politically correct euphemism for old-fashioned
tracking by ability.
Still, it’s important to remember that
your child doesn’t have to take an AP class to take the AP
test. Many students can pass AP exams without being enrolled
in AP courses. (Or without even taking the class at all, if
they are willing to study a guidebook—which is the way
my son passed World History and Comparative Government).
You shouldn’t be intimidated by the AP
tests even if your child’s school doesn’t offer AP classes
in a subject. For example, when taking a
U.S. Government class in high school, it’s not that hard
to also pass the
Comparative Government AP test, which asks about how the
government is structured in Britain, Mexico, China, Russia,
Nigeria, and Iran. If you spend a year in class working on
American politics, you’ll obtain enough of a conceptual
framework about how governments can be organized that it’s
not hard to learn about six other countries in your spare
time from a
test guidebook.
Moreover, if your school doesn’t offer a particular AP exam,
you can always drive your kid to another school that does.
But is the expansion of AP testing truly a
good idea? Are we instead already scraping the bottom of the
barrel, getting kids to pony up
$86 per exam to take tests they have no hope of passing?
The good news, as shown by the figures in
the College Board’s
National Summary Report for 2008, is that despite
the huge increase in the number of AP tests taken between
1998 and 2008, whites and Asians haven’t yet run into severe
diminishing returns. Although the quantity of AP tests taken
by whites grew 155 percent over the last decade, their mean
score dropped merely from 3.04 to 2.96. The fall-off for
Asians was even less, from 3.10 to 3.08.
(AP exams are graded on a 1 to 5 scale,
with a 5 said to be the equivalent of an A in a typical
college freshman introductory
 course,
a 3 being a C, and a 1 an F. It’s usually assumed that a 3
is a "passing score,"
although tougher colleges now often require a 4. At the
stratospheric level,
MIT accepts only 5s, and
Caltech doesn’t give advanced placement at all, because
its intro courses are so advanced.)
The
“pass rate” (the percent of test takers scoring 3 or
higher) is almost the same for whites (62 percent) and
Asians (64 percent). But Asians are much more aggressive
about signing up for AP tests, taking almost three times as
many per year (1.79 per capita per year versus 0.63 among
whites).
Asians have been taking formal tests since
Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty instituted the imperial
civil service exam for would-be mandarins in 605 A.D.
They’ve grown accustomed to them.
This suggests that white kids could profit
from emulating Asians. Don’t be so afraid to take an AP
test. And if you’re already planning to take a few, think
about how many more you can take. (You can review all the
tests
here.)
If you
are wondering how your kid’s scores from last May compare to
whole population, rest assured that a 3 will put him or her
in the top 5 percent of the country on any AP test, and the
top one percent on many tests.
 Here’s my graph "2008 AP Scores by Percentile." For example, U.S. History (the
third bar down) is the most widely attempted AP test. Yet,
it’s not even tried by 92 percent of the 4.3 million kids in
each year’s age cohort. And less than half of those eight
percent who try it succeeds in passing it. (By the way, you
only get to take each AP test once in a lifetime.)
The
most widely passed test in 2008 was English Literature, with
189,000 young people scoring 3s or higher. That sounds good;
however, 189,000 is merely 4.4 percent of the relevant
population.
As you may have noticed by now, I’m not
the most happy-clappy commentator when it comes to
evaluating the intellectual capabilities of
today’s youth. Yet, even I have to concede that it
wouldn’t be impossible to, say, double that 4.4 passing rate
on English Lit. The key step would be for whites in the
middle of the country to imitate Asians on the coasts:
become more confident about signing up for AP tests and more
industrious in studying for them.
Asians aren’t
exceptionally great at English Lit—but, currently, 9.7
percent of Asians pass that AP versus only 5.4 percent of
whites.
As is common on AP tests, the English Lit
exam consists of one hour of multiple-choice questions and
two hours of essay questions. One of the three essay
questions asks you to illustrate an assigned thesis using
examples from one of 32 recommended literary works, a list
that varies each year. If you haven’t read any of this
year’s 32, you aren’t completely out of luck because you are
allowed to choose
"another novel or
play of comparable literary merit". Still, I have to
imagine that the graders (high school teachers on their
summer break) look askance upon those who must use a
substitute because they haven’t read widely.
To a young person, this question can be
worrisome: who has time to, say, read enough of Dickens’
novels to be sure that you have
Dickens covered? And there are so many famous books that
a Dickens novel only shows up on the list every few years!
Having glanced through the last ten lists
of 32 recommended works, my first tip for students would be
to read plays rather than novels. Plays are shorter than
novels and there are fewer famous ones. If you polish off
Death of a Salesman,
The Crucible,
Long Day’s Journey into Night,
A Streetcar Named Desire,
The Three Sisters,
and a few other high school classics, you’ll almost
certainly find one of them on the list of 32.
Second, make sure to read several famous
African-American books, such as
Invisible Man,
Native Son,
Beloved, and
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
It appears that the College Board has set itself a quota
that about 10-15 percent of its lists be books by blacks.
Since there aren’t very many black classics, each one
individually is more likely to appear on the list than a
book by a white author.
The College Board also seems to maintain
quotas for other minority groups, but most of the non-black
diversity books are too obscure to bother with. For
instance, what is
Obasan from the
2005 test about: the President’s secret Japanese
grandfather?
I suppose the cleverest ploy would be to
read famous African-American plays such as
A Raisin in the Sun or the best known works of
August Wilson.
To my mind, the most impressive scores are
found on the two Calculus tests. Three percent of America’s
youth passes Calculus AB, and two kids out of every 300 get
a 5 on the fearsome
Calculus BC exam. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much,
but it’s better than young people do on, say, U.S.
Government or European History, which don’t require math
skills.
Americans have invested much money in teaching math since
the 1980s, and these are some positive signs of progress.
On the
other hand, these overall performances are pretty awful.
 Which
AP tests are easiest? Here are the 2008 subjects sorted by
mean grade, with the number of test takers in parentheses.
For example, 3,290 students took the Chinese AP exam, with
over 80 percent scoring a 5 (the great majority of them
immigrants -- it’s extremely hard to learn an East Asian
language well just in high school). As you can see, the
exams with the highest scores are reserved for either people
who grew up speaking a foreign language or who are very good
at something very difficult like calculus, programming,
physics, or music theory, subjects that take years to
prepare for. In other words, there aren’t any pushover AP
exams.
Still, it’s worth looking for tests that
could be passed after just one year of study. The first exam
down from the top that looks plausible for somebody
motivated less by a deep desire to learn than by a shallow
desire to pick up some college course credits is
Psychology.
Then, there’s good old
Comparative Government. Environmental Science is rumored
to be relatively easy.
Oddly
enough, the tests with the lowest average scores seem more
promising. Quite a few of these tests are taken by 9th and
10th graders, such as World History, which has the lowest
average score, and Human Geography, which has the fourth
worst grades. It might not be that difficult for a more
mature, worldlier senior to brush up in his free time on
both Geography and World History during the spring of his
final year.
There has been a big push to get Non-Asian
Minorities (NAMs) to take more AP tests. This goes
all the way back to the fine 1988 movie
Stand
and Deliver,
with Edward James Olmos playing
Jaime
Escalante, the famous math teacher at Garfield H.S. in
East LA who had
considerable success getting the smartest students at
that huge school to pass the AP Calculus test.
Over
the last decade, the number of AP tests taken by minorities
has skyrocketed (up 340 percent for Hispanics and up 322
percent for blacks).
Unfortunately,
the
usual racial gaps in achievement are found on the AP as
well.
Now we
get to my Sotomayor segment!
If you are wondering why Judge Sotomayor
is such an
avid
backer of ethnic preferences for
Puerto Ricans (such as, to pick a random example,
herself) consider the results for the AP U.S. Government
test. This might be thought of as a first cut on the
question of who might someday be qualified to be a federal
judge. In 2008, 15,762 whites earned a 5—versus only 79
Puerto Ricans.
The
tremendous growth from 1998 to 2008 in Hispanics taking AP
tests drove down their average score on the 1 to 5 scale
from 2.99 to 2.42. Their passing rate dipped from 60 percent
42 percent.
(And keep in mind that Hispanic mean
scores are exaggerated because so many native
Spanish-speakers take the Spanish Language test, which ought
to be, but isn’t always, a free throw for them. Indeed, 56
percent of all 5s earned by Hispanics in 2008 came on the
Spanish Language exam. Excluding it, Latinos in 2008
averaged a 2.17 score with a 35 percent passing rate. Asians
likewise enjoy an
edge on the Chinese and Japanese language tests, but
those make up a tiny percentage of total Asian test-taking.)
Black
scores fell a comparable amount over the last decade, from a
mean of 2.21 to 1.91 (with the passing rate dropping from 35
percent to 26 percent). Still, despite depressingly
diminishing returns, more than quadrupling the number of AP
tests taken by blacks from 1998 to 2008 helped the absolute
number of tests passed by blacks to triple.
There just aren’t enough minorities
passing these tests to yield the sort of
proportional representation that Sotomayor
et al want.
That’s why, further down the career chain, they are adamant
about imposing quotas, in whatever guise.
My overall conclusion: the news about
Advanced Placement tests is fairly good. The glass is still
mostly empty, but it
is getting fuller.
The beneficial effects of AP testing stems
in large part because people like Judge Sotomayor haven’t
gotten a chance to apply their disparate impact dogma to it
… yet.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative. His
website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S
HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND
INHERITANCE", is available
here.]
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