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JoshuaZ comments on Advanced Placement exam cutoffs and superficial knowledge over deep knowledge - Less Wrong
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Comments (18)
I don't think percentages in this sort of context are a good metric. People under time pressure or stress make a lot of mistakes often.
Now, as to the issue of superficial knowledge rather than deep knowledge, if this is the case (and I suspect it is although for reasons largely unrelated to the AP exam pressures), this shouldn't be a big deal. At the highschool level most kids have little idea what they enjoy or are genuinely talented at. Having them get a few tastes of more advanced material in a variety of subjects is therefore good. Also, at a practical level, actually getting kids at that point to have an in depth understanding of subjects is often difficult. For example in the calculus case, sequences and series are one of the last things taught, and they are substantially more abstract and are simply easier to teach when students have had more hands on experience with what calculus can do.
Still, doesn't 63% for calculus seem low? I think that if you know all of the material like the back of your hand, you can get 85+% right even with mistakes.
A possible concern is that what people learn might be too superficial for them to get even a "taste."
The case of sequences and series is interesting. My impression is that most students who get 5's on AP Calculus BC really don't understand the topic. If I were designing the curriculum, I think that I would pare down that portion of the course so that students got a more gentle introduction.
85% of what? I guarantee you that I can write a calculus exam, using only AP-level material, that is long enough or algebraically messy enough that you can't get 85% of it right in three hours (or whatever the actual time limit is). There is no fundamental reason the AP exams should have exactly the same difficulty curve (5% of students can get 100%, another 10% can get over 90%, another 30% can get over 80% or whatever) as a high school class.
Of the points on the AP exam (based on examining the questions and scoring criteria myself).