Are Advanced Placement Teachers truly Qualified?

By Rohan Gupta

I'm sure many college students are familiar with the the "Advanced Placement" system offered by the College Board. It is a system that allows high school students to take college level classes in high school and it provides the students with an opportunity to exempt the actual introductory college classes when they go to school. In order for students to receive college credit for the classes, they must perform very well on the examinations that are held at the end of the courses in high school. College students who took the advanced placement (AP) exams in high school know that they are by no means easy and they also know that many students who take them do not perform very well. One reason that I noticed for the poor performance by many students, specifically at my high school, was not that they did not wish to properly learn the material, but because they were not taught the material properly.

I went to high school in a small town south of Atlanta called La Grange, Georgia. The high school just like almost all of the high schools in Georgia offered the AP courses, but there were some interesting aspects of the courses taught at the school that I observed. I also took many of the courses that were offered. I noticed that many students performed poorly on the AP exams on all those courses with the exception of about three. The reason that there were high exam scores in those few courses was because the teachers had been teaching those courses for about twenty years and they were very old; all of the other AP teachers did not have such tenure. Could tenure of the teacher be correlated with exam scores?

I always pondered on that question, but I found a more precise answer to the question by coming to Georgia Tech. On the first day of classes at Georgia Tech, all of professors showed their credentials and I noticed that all of the teachers had completed bachelors, masters and doctoral levels of education, but were not very old. After a few weeks of classes, I saw that the professors all knew how to teach their subjects very well. In comparison, my high school teachers had only completed a bachelors degree and were teaching college level classes and taught rather poorly. Though the teachers were qualified by the College Board to teach AP classes, it was apparent that they did not have nearly enough education to teach college level courses in comparison to professors who actually taught college courses.

After making these observations, it became clear to me why the students performed so poorly. The teachers did not know how to teach the material properly and did not know how to properly prepare the students to perform well on the AP exams. Teachers who wish to teach college level courses in high school must experience the similar rigor that professors have had to experience in order to teach actual college courses. Granted, that the high school teachers will eventually gain the experience to teach their AP courses well, but it should not be at the students' expense. High school students who wish to gain college credit and opt out of introductory classes should be taught by educators who truly have mastery over the material that they will teach and know how to teach it properly.