It is more like they are giving parents yet another torture device. Until parents say NO to the incessant testing in our educational system, there is going to be more of this sort of thing.

In my area there are a lot of private schools, and a lot of competition for the more prestigious schools. There are actual services that will help your little darlings prep for the ever important Kindergarten admissions test/interview.

I am now happy that I will be in 9th grade next year.

"rigorous high school courses"

I do not believe that this test will improve people's lives. Teaching to a test---twisted priorities. I think that the time I've spent in schools taking standardized tests and doing mandatory preparation for them detracted significantly from the time teachers could spend doing interesting things.

On the other hand, I do believe that many nervous parents and the like would anxiously welcome anything they thought would improve their children's SAT scores, which might account for the survey results that the Times cites.

As a junior this year who is loaded with testing (PSAT in November, SAT in January, ACT in April, SAT Subject Testing in May, Five AP tests in May) I really resent the efforts to load another test onto unwilling children.

I know that when I applied to private school, I had to take this three hour long test called the ISEE, and it was really a huge waste of time. There's only so many tests that you need to differentiate kids talent levels.

If I get a 790 on my SAT Math this year, does that mean I'm any worse at math than someone who got an 800? Probably not. It mostly means that I miss bubble something, or wrote a 3/2 as a 3 and 1/2, or something stupid like that. Now, if I got, say a 710 on the SAT math, how could that be interpreted? The margins of error on tests, in my opinion, come mostly from errors in the FORMAT, not errors in content. God knows how many times I've gotten the dreaded "off-by-one" on the bubble sheet and had to go back and re-do problems, costing me valuable time. I know I'm capable of doing all of them correctly, it's just the format of these types of "fill-in-the-bubble" testing that drives me crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I can see the value of having a first-order filter to weed out the kids who are clearly terrible at some skills.

I just think that the proper way to do this sort of thing would be an oral-exam with qualified teacher.

Something more like an interview, where the interviewer gives you problems out loud, and asks that you talk out what you're thinking. That sort of thing (being able to communicate problem solving ideas) is MUCH more useful in the long run, and I think that's honestly what these schools are looking for in their applicants.

because high school is oh so rigorous

Nonprofit CollegeBoard? They charge per AP test! I'll have to pay this year, maybe if I decide to challenge the Calc AB exam.

I feel sorry for the eighth graders. They don't need the pressure before high school. As time moves on, colleges will probably look at those scores too

It doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. I don't know about other states, but California already has yearly standardized testing in every grade. Few people care about the results of those tests, and few people will care about the results of this one. The fact that colleges won't look at it (and as they don't look at anything else from middle school, I don't see why they'd be tempted) essentially cripples its pressure-inducing capabilities.

Also, I should think grading that many free-responses would be expensive.

It's worth paying for the AP Exams ... . The more AP exams you take in HS the better. If the college you're being accepted at will recognize the AP exams, you just save yourselves few thousand dollars in tuition and the interest you would have to pay. Let's say, 800dollars/unit for a college calculus class. Well... 5 units ...4000 dollars. And this could be the same for every AP you take. Is it worth taking the AP in HS ? You bet!
... But for MS? I don't see the point ... . With so many Tests in place already, what can another bring?

I disagree that it's worth taking all the APs you can. First of all, not many of them will actually count as college credit at a top-tier school. They're not highly trusted by these colleges, and with good reason -- there are plenty of people getting 5's on AP Calculus who cannot pass a first-year calculus final at a decent college. This is why many colleges have had to restructure their calculus courses so that what used to be precalculus is now called Calc 1, and what used to be Calc 1 is Calc 2, and so on. So, the AP passer gets put into Calc 2 after failing to pass the college's calculus diagnostic test. Thereby, they get to take a traditional first-year calculus class, but still get to feel like they AP'ed out of something. Bah.

But an even bigger problem to me are the number of future math/science people taking 5-10 AP arts classes in their last two years of high school, mainly because they have run out of math/science AP options. If there were *no* APs, these students would have a clear incentive to find other educational options, like spending a half-day at a local university, or doing independent study in their areas of interest. Either would be better than notching a 5 in AP French History to get into fair Harvard. The incentives set up by the AP system and the perceived value of it to college admissions are a significant obstacle to a student who is very interested in just one or two areas. They can't indulge that passion until college, and lose a few years of study, feeling forced to pass irrelevant tests. (I don't mean "AP arts classes are useless" -- I think it's good to have a deep exposure to one or two areas outside science. But 5-10 is absurd.)

"ReadiStep", haha

In an ideal world, we would have competent teachers everywhere and thus, we wouldn't need any type of standardized testing, because everyone would be learning regardless. However, there are tons of incompetent teachers in our education system, so standardized tests are needed to go along with these teachers. It seems like a better solution than standardized tests would be to make schooling private so that schools would compete for the best teachers and the best reputation (like colleges do now). Money is a great motivator for everyone This would also help to removing the idea that all of high school should be spent only trying to get into a good college.

This new test is supposed to "help prepare eighth graders for rigorous high school courses and college." From what I have seen so far, preparations for the "next" level of education (elementary school -> middle school, middle school -> high school, etc) are useless; the same people are still hopelessly lost in the transfer and the transfer does nothing to everyone else. I think that this test will be a waste of time; most people don't seem to get much better at critical reading / math anyway, so I'm not sure what good the test is supposed to do.

As for College Board being non-profit, I have a hard time believing that. They sell study guides, with the knowledge that those books do almost nothing for your score on the SAT / AP exams. In addition, the that I had to pay for each exam last year seemed a bit steep (particularly on my Physics C exam, where I had to pay the fee twice for two 1/2 length exams).

It seems that most of what College Board does is not very helpful; while the AP exams are a step in the right direction, a simple score of 1 to 5 is not even remotely useful in terms of how well you know the material. More useful feedback would be excellent here.

I have a pretty high opinion of the AP calculus test; the calculus curriculum is universal enough for the system to work well in this case. Where I am, the AB test is good for two quarters of calculus- maybe a little thin at the end, so we'll only give one quarter credit for a 3 or 4. The BC test gives you the same two quarters.
What's going on here? Our third quarter of calculus is a complete mess, cramming an inadequate treatment of Taylor series and the first part of multivariable calculus into too little time. We simply don't teach numerical series before analysis, and it's a serious hole.
From the perspective of the big state universities I know, AP calculus is a good match for college classes, except where the college is wrong.
This is only a problem if they're not taking math at all. The first two years or so of the college math sequence are very linear; you can't do the calculus sequence in parallel. That means that you'll be taking many classes in other areas, and you might as well go for reasonably advanced material. I personally took lots of APs those years, while also taking a math class each semester at CSULB. The AP classes didn't do much directly- they just indicated I should take other classes within those areas.
I could theoretically have gone for a degree in two years, if I'd settled for a lesser university. It wasn't something I seriously considered.

This is exactly what I mean by the 5-10 APs being a problem -- often these students are not taking any math (and sometimes no science) at all.

If your university is happy with the AP Calculus test/curriculum, it's in the distant minority of the ones that I've talked to (admittedly, not a huge sample, but I think your pro vote is the first I've heard).

I'm not speaking for the authorities at the college, just from my own experiences there. The bit about UW's third quarter being a mess, on the other hand, is the opinion of pretty much everybody involved in teaching or taking it.
I would probably treat the AP similarly to a random community college class- which means accepting it for credit in most cases.

To be fair, I wouldn't ignore the AP test, but I would test incoming students. I probably wouldn't make a 5 on the BC pass a test to skip first semester, but I would make 'em take a test to skip anything else. Everyone else takes the test.

There's another skew in the AP scores that few people talk about -- that awful Newsweek 1-factor model (along with parents pushing for calculus well before a kid is ready for it) has led to a lot more people taking the test than should be. The test is graded on a curve. . . Predictably, 3's, 4's, and 5's are therefore on average much less strong than 3's, 4's, and 5's a decade ago. Even if the AP curriculum is rock-solid, as a university, I'd have to look at the soaring numbers of people taking the test and be worried that the distribution of scores isn't notably changing as well.

Let's ask ourselves why we have so many tests in our society? Well, they're to make sure that we're learning, right?

First, these tests can only measure the student's ability to memorize key terms that have no meaning in isolation. They cannot measure problem solving ability, because if they gave a problem that wasn't in the textbook, they would probably be reprimanded for giving a "bad" test, maybe even sued. But we know that problem solving and an appreciation for the "big picture," that is, a knowledge of the concepts, not the obscure terminology, is important, so how do we measure this?

Well, the person best qualified to comment on a student's problem solving ability is certainly the teacher! The teacher is the person listening to and answering the student's questions. So why do we not ask the teacher to evaluate the student's ability?

The answer is simple. Can every teacher, every single teacher in every single school in the entire U.S. give and honest and entirely correct appraisal of the student's ability? No. The best teachers can, but some teachers only go by the book and never really focus on problem solving at all (I had one of these teachers). But then what good is the certification system if we have well-meaning, able educators like Mr. Rusczyk whose courses aren't even accepted by most schools as credit while there are teachers who don't even care about teaching their students how to learn?

At least, that's a student's two cents.

P.S. I'd take AoPS courses, but I'm too burdened with tests that prepare me for more tests, which prepare...

During my 8th grade year, about 30 days were taken up by standardized testing. Eventually this has to seem unneccesary.