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Board issues AP standards

The administrators of Advanced Placement courses recently announced a plan to create a set of expectations and regulations high school classes must meet to label any class "AP."

High school AP courses give students the opportunity to take on rigorous coursework and earn college credits after passing a standardized test. However, some so-called AP classes might not be as rigorous as others carrying the same AP label.

"The expectation is that the [AP] curriculum is constant across all the high schools," said Roby Blust, dean of undergraduate admissions at Marquette University.

According to the College Board AP Central website, the 2007-08 school year marks the start of the AP Course Audit, an authorization process with a set of expectations used to decide if a class is designated to be labeled as AP. The expectations, designed by university professors for college-level courses, authorize a class to use the AP label if the course meets or surpasses these regulations.

And Blust said with the start of the AP Course Audit, Marquette University will examine AP standards more closely for the fall 2008 school year.

To standardize AP courses, the College Board will require teachers to send a detailed copy of the class syllabus, along with an audit form, for the course to be authorized as AP in 2007-08. The College Board site said schools can still include their own curriculum in the AP courses as long as the syllabus follows the expectations placed by the audit.

Blust said the new system will be helpful because there is difficulty in judging one AP class from another in the college admissions process.

"We are going to get the [high school] courses certified through AP," Blust said. "We are going to see where they stand in terms of levels of certification."

Tom Reason, associate director of admissions at the University of Wisconsin, said he does not know if the AP course audit will have an effect on the admissions process. Yet, Reason added the change will cause elevated standards for all AP classes.

According to Reason, about three-fourths of the incoming freshmen at the UW have taken an AP class or have AP credits. But he said the UW admissions office reviews many different aspects of a student's application in addition to high school courses.

"Still, there is not an absolute guarantee that a course [called] one thing someplace has the same rigor somewhere else," Reason said.

Part of the challenge is judging the standards of one AP class from another at different high schools, and Reason said the level of trust colleges and secondary schools have with one another is one way colleges try to establish relationships with high schools. But Reason said he is concerned about the competition level at high schools in terms of coursework because schools in some areas do not have the same rigor in their coursework with respect to others.

Reason said he still has no reason to worry about keeping UW a competitive institution.