AP® Program Introduction

The benefits of building a strong AP® Program are numerous and far-reaching. Advanced Placement Students are better equipped for the rigors of college, and high pass rates mean college becomes more accessible and affordable to your student body. AP® success also translates to a more favorable evaluation of your school, and improvements to your regional reputation. However, creating a strong program while providing equitable access to a diverse group of students can be a daunting task. There are hundreds of moving parts to consider, and full buy-in is needed from all parties involved. So let’s talk about how to accomplish this at your school. Here are some effective steps and strategies you can use to make sure your efforts are productive.

Determine Your Starting Point

Before you choose your first step, you’ve got to locate your program on the spectrums of success and equity. This can be a tricky thing to do because there are a lot of important aspects of AP® program success to consider. Get your AP® leadership team together for a program success meeting, and hammer out as many of these details as possible before you build and implement a new strategy. You’ll want to consider and resolve as many of these questions as possible:

• Is our program access equitable? Does the diversity of our AP® students match the diversity of the student body?
• How do our pass rates compare to the national average? What about the state average?
• Are we offering the number and types of AP® courses that our students need to be competitive, both in college admissions and academic endeavors?
• What funds are available to strengthen our AP® program, and what other sources of funding exist?

You can assess diversity by comparing the proportion of students belonging to underrepresented groups in your school to the proportion of these students within the AP® test taking population. Once you’ve reached a 1:1 ratio, you’ll have achieved program equity. While this is a fantastic long-term goal, it’s a good idea to aim for stable annual improvement toward this perfect ratio.

This discussion is the first step toward mobilizing your staff toward these aims, and also will develop a set of concrete, measurable goals. It might be a good idea to set your main goals at 3 or 5 years, with target numbers for the end of each AP® season along the way.

Next, it’s important to contextualize your aims within your broader mission as educators. The CollegeBoard and your school are very much aligned in their desire to mold high school students into stronger critical thinkers, writers, and communicators. Your first step should be to consider broad initiatives to reach students long before they sit down in their first AP® classes.

Design Initiatives to Increase AP® Readiness

Ideally, your AP® Students will be ready for an AP® course by the time they are able to enroll in one. While this concept is simple, achieving this type of readiness across a school can be challenging, and requires a coordinated effort, reaching as far back as middle school instruction.

Emphasize writing and critical reading in all intellectual disciplines. AP® courses offer mountains of challenging content and difficult concepts, but each AP® course also expects students to articulate their knowledge using the written word. Therefore, the AP® test shouldn’t be your students’ first exposure to math or science writing. Strengthen the bridge of communication between your AP® instructors and their pre AP® counterparts by adding an AP® readiness component to departmental meetings. Require your STEM staff to place a higher emphasis on communicating ideas and answering high-level conceptual questions that test their reading comprehension.

AP® Courses shouldn’t feel like a quantum leap to your students. They should feel like the logical next step.

Mobilize your student body in mentoring younger students who are headed toward the APs. Form a group of high-achieving AP® volunteers to serve as ambassadors to younger students at your school. All students involved will benefit from a mentor-ship exchange, and the ambassador students will be able to communicate the rigor and benefits of AP® classes to the younger students in ways that your staff cannot. This leadership experience will be constructive for ambassadors in strengthening their college applications, and if possible, incentives such as meals or t-shirts could be employed.

Communicate the value of AP® instruction to your student body early and often. From freshman orientation onward, students need to know the benefits of AP® courses and feel empowered to take on the significant workload associated. According to the CollegeBoard, students report taking AP® courses for three primary reasons.

• College benefits in the form of credit received and stronger applications
• More interesting, in-depth material
• Access to fantastic teachers

Put a spotlight on your best AP® teachers, and celebrate the successes of students within your program. Every student should understand the tangible benefits associated with Advanced Placement at your school.

Frame Your AP® Courses Around Equity and Success

It’s well known that many students with AP® potential miss out on AP® courses because they are not identified or encouraged. This issue affects students of color and lower-income students dis-proportionally and should be addressed in the course of strengthening your program.

Start with the AP® Potential web tool, which will allow your team to identify students who are likely to succeed on a given AP® test based on their previous performance on the PSAT®/NMSQT. Of course, this tool should never be used to discourage an eager student, but can be useful in finding prospects who may not initially be on your radar. This can be a start toward making your AP® program a more equitable environment, and remove some biases from student evaluation.

Start by informing these students and their families that they’ve been identified as strong candidates for an AP® course, and include a congratulatory message. This is a big vote of confidence from your staff that can be highly motivating for students and greatly appreciated by parents. If your school serves multilingual communities, invest in additional outreach to include students and families from these linguistic and cultural groups.

Schedule special events for the language groups that make up your population of families, so that parents who speak primarily Spanish, Haitian, Arabic, or another language are equipped to support their students and encourage their enrollment and success. These events are particularly effective when run by students from these communities along with any staff with the necessary speaking competency. This type of outreach can extend into peer ambassador programs, so that students have relatable mentors and academic role models who share their language or background. Representation is vital in underlining the fact that Advanced Placement courses are for all students.

Many schools pursue an open enrollment AP® course policy, which ensures another layer of opportunity. Consider whether some or all of your programs would benefit from such a policy by evaluating the starting point, rigor, and content complexity of each of your AP® courses. Some Humanities courses lend themselves better to open enrollment since they will rely more on established skills than prerequisite knowledge. Part of this process is recognizing your pre-AP® strengths and weaknesses

Set Expectations Before Summer Break

Now that you’ve got your group of interested students, it’s time to build expectations and accountability into the AP® System. Here are a few useful techniques for your school to iterate on:

1. Create an enrollment form which details course expectations for students and their parents or guardians to sign. This might include a commitment to complete summer homework and attend mandatory Saturday or afternoon review sessions in the weeks leading up to the exams. This can be particularly helpful when pursuing an open enrollment policy.
2. Some schools have had great success with an AP® brunch, where students are recognized for their decision to enroll, and informed about the depth and rigor of the upcoming courses. Teachers should present, and a student panel can outline the most effective strategies as well as the realistic demands of each AP® course.
3. If funding allows, schedule an AP® Boot Camp just before school starts, where students set up any tech resources and push for the completion of their summer assignments and review. This will dampen the effects of procrastination and shake away the rust so that content can start at full pace during the school year.

Support Your Students and Teachers Throughout the Year

Your teachers have the topical expertise to teach at the AP® level, but there are a lot of unique challenges that come with teaching an AP® course. To reach the pinnacle of success, a teacher must have a complete understanding of the test’s format, objectives, and grading criteria. Further, the AP® curriculum is a moving target. The CollegeBoard is in the midst of overhauling the APs to put greater emphasis on:

• Discipline-specific inquiry, reasoning, and communication skills
• Rigorous, research-based curricula, modeled on introductory college courses
• Questions designed to elicit evidence of student achievement for each learning objective

If at all possible, try to send your newest AP® teachers to the CollegeBoard’s AP® Summer Institutes so that they can gain a full understanding of their course’s objectives. Make sure that your AP® Coordinator keeps a full file of the latest information from the CollegeBoard on each class for the sake of alignment.

Finally, ensure that your teachers and students have access to the best resources possible throughout the year. AP® courses contain tons of content, and it can be extremely taxing for teachers to write their own questions that are aligned to the AP® test. Students want and need lots of quality practice, and need to be empowered to learn from their mistakes.

Consider implementing an Albert license at your school to facilitate better student outcomes and save your teachers hours a week.

Albert is the largest library of quality, aligned AP® questions available, with an ever-increasing catalog that already exceeds 50,000 questions. Each question is tagged to topic, subtopic, and CollegeBoard objective so that teachers can select problem sets in seconds and be confident that all of their students’ practice is directly relevant to the exam. This means that study time is always productive, and that’s a major edge in pursuit of excellent outcomes for your students.

Aside from the best prep questions, Albert also provides instant feedback to students in the form of detailed problem explanations. Unlike with traditional assignments or other platforms, your students will be able to guide their progress and fill in any knowledge gaps on any internet-connected device. This leaves more class time to differentiate instruction and review.

Finally, licensing costs only $2.50-12.50 per student, which is less than half the cost of AP® prep alternatives. Albert provides unmatched quality and can be one of the most inexpensive pillars of your AP® program’s growth.