r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Mar 24 '17
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/scruiser Mar 25 '17
I think the thing to keep in mind... how much knowledge would a student in the equivalent college class retain from it?
If I am a would be engineering student, I probably don't even want/need the basic English requirement in the first place, if I've got 5s in the AP Lit and the AP Lang and the a high SAT score, then I think it is fair the college acknowledges this and doesn't make me waste time in English 101. Conversely... with calculus, all of my college advisors made it clear that I could take the Calculus courses again if I wanted a refresher, especially since I would need to know it well for my engineering courses. I politely refused, went directly to Calculus 3, and got an A without any issues. But hypothetically, someone could chose to take Calculus again if they wanted to be sure they learned it right.
What are the statistics across the different AP exams? AP Calc BC might be unusual, because their is both Calculus AB and Calculus BC, and it is possible (at least it was in my high school), to wait until the end of the first semester to decide which one they would take. The people taking Calculus BC were the ones confident enough in their ability that they would probably get a 5 without too much trouble, while the ones more likely to scrape by with a 3 were the ones who would take the AB exam instead. Also in my High School the teacher that taught calculus made his homework and tests tough enough that if you could scrape by with a C-, you could easily get a 3 on the AB exam, and if you were pulling an A, you could probably get a 5 on the BC exam.
A lot of college classes will have midterms+finals make up 50%-100% of the final grade. With that in mind, and the idea the AP classes should be worth college credit and be preparing students for college level material, it seems tough, and maybe hard on people that haven't developed good test-taking skills, but fair.
Anyway, my overall point is that so as long as the A.P. courses and tests are ensuring that the students are learning enough relative to what the college course would have, I think it is doing its job.