Benilde-St. Margaret's is a private, Catholic, co-educational school located in the Minneapolis metropolitan area. It serves grades 7-12 and has a long history of excellence in academics, sports, and the performing arts, both within the Catholic and local community. As of 2018, 84% of Benilde students identify as white, 5% as Latino, 4% as African American, 3% as Asian, and 3% as multiracial. After graduation, approximately 93% of students go on to a 4-year college. Benilde offers 15 AP courses. Between the years 2014 and 2018, the percentage of AP students that score a 3 or greater on AP exams has increased from 76% to 85% — despite the fact that scores have remained relatively stagnant, both statewide (66%) and globally (61%). Benilde students are not only outperforming their peers, but they are also engaging in more opportunities to earn college credit prior during high school.
Although increases in pass rates have been observed across the board at Benilde, students have performed exceptionally well in math. In 2018, the average score for Benilde’s AP Calculus BC students was a 4.35, with a subscore of 4.65 for the AB portion of the exam, 12.2% and 18.2% greater than the national average respectively. Significant growth has been observed in the humanities as well. Benilde’s average score on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam rose from a 2.63 in 2014 to a 3.60 in 2018. In the same time period the average score for AP European History increased from 2.33 to 3.67.
Teachers at Benilde have years of teaching experience, and many have taught the same AP courses for several years in a row. More than half have participated in an Albert-specific training and many have participated in a College Board training, too. These trainings show teachers how to use Albert’s advanced features such as tracking progress by learning objective or using assignments to create formative and summative assessments.
For this study, nearly 10,000 student guesses were analyzed from approximately 1200 different Albert assignments to better understand how Albert is used in AP classrooms. We collected four years’ worth of data — half from the two years before Albert was introduced, and half from the two years after teachers started using Albert. The data collected included test scores, the number of student guesses, active students, active teachers, and assignments created. The usage measures were used to determine “high usage” and “low usage” subjects on which we conducted further analysis. It was predicted that subjects with higher usage would have greater improvements in AP exam pass rates, and after analyzing the data this is seen to be true.
We broke the subjects studied on Albert into three categories: high usage, medium usage and low usage. High Albert usage means that the average student made over 50 guesses in that subject over the school year, while low usage means that the average student made fewer than 25 guesses in that subject over the school year. We focused our analysis only on subjects that fell into the high or low usage categories.
Among the high usage subjects, Benilde’s AP pass rates jumped from 70% to 82%, while in low-usage subjects, the pass rate decreased from 80% to 77%. The large jump from 70% to 82% in the high usage courses demonstrates that exposure to practice questions on Albert can significantly improve outcomes, even in high-achieving groups. Since the opposite was observed for the low usage subjects, further investigation is required to determine if there is a correlation between low usage and lower scores, or if this is just the result of average score fluctuation.
Benilde is well established with a successful AP program that predates Albert. However, using Albert has taken their AP program to the next level. In subjects with a historically low pass rate, high usage of Albert resulted in a significant increase in the percentage of students who passed the exam in May. Answering rigorous and aligned practice questions, examining results, and analyzing areas of improvement on Albert is a low-lift way for even experienced AP teachers to improve outcomes for their students.
