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Document-Based Question: What Is the Historical Significance of the Advanced Placement Test?
Timothy A. Hacsi
| Testing has played important roles in education in the United States over the past century, and, if anything, the importance of tests has been increasing since the late 1980s. In particular, the use of standardized, statewide tests has grown dramatically. Tests shape the classes children are placed in, determine whether they can enter and graduate from high school, and influence what kind of college they can hope to attend. After students graduate from college, tests continue to act as barriers or gateways if they seek postgraduate degrees. Yet not all tests are the same. Some are designed to sort students, while others are intended to influence schools or school districts. Some tests, such as Advanced Placement (AP) tests, offer extensive rewards for students if they do well; others give students little that they would not have if the test did not exist but can punish students who do poorly. Some such tests are meant to rank students hierarchically based on their performance, much as IQ tests do.1 Other kinds of tests are meant to change how classrooms and schools function by shaping curricula or putting pressure on schools to improve (as judged, not coincidentally, by scores on standardized tests). Those varying goals for tests are not mutually exclusive. Some tests are designed to do one thing, while others are multipurpose. |
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AP tests, more than most, provide a carrot for students: Do well on this test and be rewarded; do poorly and there is relatively little negative consequence. Exploring the differing roles that various kinds of tests have played may help put AP tests in their proper context; it may also say a great deal about how (or if) testing has changed education and how it has served to enhance, rather than reform, the major functions of public schooling in the United States. |
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The focus here is not on how the AP United States history test has changed over time, but instead on how it, and the AP program in general, fit into the broader history of testing in the United States over the past century. I will briefly describe several tests that have had an important impact, either by shaping what occurred in schools or by affecting individual students' opportunities. I will also examine how testing has functioned in a society and an educational system that use schooling for the dual functions of passing along class status to children of middle- and upper-class families (thereby reinforcing inequality) and allowing some individual upward mobility. |
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