Many high school graduates after completing Advanced Placement (AP) courses enter college with poor study skills, weak communication skills, and the inability to perform higher-level cognitive tasks.

While their high school academic records are impressive and indicate that they completed AP courses in specific subjects, when faced with college-level coursework, these students are not so successful in completing instructional activities that require them to tackle multiple high-level cognitive tasks such as application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Specifically, these first-year college students have difficulty functioning as independent learners, are unable to think at the higher levels of the cognitive domain, and experience a great deal of stress when they realize they must accept academic support services at their colleges or universities.

These students are victims of high schools where instructional strategies used in AP courses are less than demanding, where teachers spend enormous amounts of time lecturing and helping students memorize large volumes of information. The instructional focus of these AP teachers is primarily on helping students pass the AP tests, rather than providing interesting content and instructional activities that promote higher level thinking skills.

There are many benefits for students taking rigorous AP courses. The key is increasing rigor and offering AP courses on the high school level that are truly representative of college-level coursework.

* Gwendolyn H. Middlebrooks is associate professor of education at Spelman College in Atlanta. She is a member of the Georgia Association of Educators and recently served on the review panel for Thought & Action, the NEA Higher Education Journal.

No, the role of the nation's colleges and universities is to 'set the height of the bar.'
Rick Moehring *

As I see it, higher education's role is not to decide if Advanced Placement (AP) course instruction needs to be more rigorous, but instead to decide what level of demonstrated student achievement in such courses warrants college-level credit.

We need to honor the college-level studies of high-achieving high school students. I would hate to see us act in a way that might encourage these students to "stall-out" academically while they wait for their chronological age to catch up with their ability.

High-ability students who take advanced high school courses without AP college credit would find themselves repeating content in college courses for which they have already achieved mastery in high school. This redundancy could create a climate of cynicism as students are forced to postpone the more challenging academic studies they desire.

As an educator, I understand why some would argue that the amount and level of college credit given to students should be restricted for work achieved during high school years. But, as a parent of a high-ability student, I am concerned about what may happen if we ask these bright students to wait until they enroll in college to explore higher learning.

The decision of how high an advanced placement score should be to warrant college credit—based on a scale numbered 1 to 5—can and does vary from campus to campus and subject to subject.

The challenge for the universities is to determine the height of the bar to be cleared for AP credit. It is then up to the high schools to prepare their students to reach it.

* Rick Moehring, president of the Johnson County Community College Faculty Association in Kansas, has been a counselor for 20 years. His counselor/advisor position has afforded him extensive experience with transfer student issues.