AP Statistics course URL : http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apstatistics. AP courses will rarely provide a credit (i.e., the grade that the university will put on their transcript), but they can be used as a certifying prerequisite (i.e., you can jump on to the next course in the college sequence if you demonstrated good performance in the AP class in high school).
Herein lies the catch: a student who may have taken AP Statistics in high school may not see a statistics class in college whatsoever. That could be really unfortunate. There is an astonishing number of approximately 200K high school students taking an AP class this year, yet we can only convert them to less than 2,000 undergrads coming out with Bachelor degrees in statistics. Having my kid going through AP Calculus now as a high school student, and knowing who is going to teach AP Statistics, I have very mixed feelings about these courses. The reality is that AP Statistics will be taught by somebody who, at best, has a degree in math education (i.e., is a proper math degree dropout), and zero experience (95% CI: [0,0]) in statistics. As a statistics professional, I advised my son to skip AP Stat, with the hopes that he would be able to take statistics from somebody with a degree in it when he goes to college. The uptake of the American Statistical Association resources for AP Stat instructors appears to have been dismal; I was not able to convince the teachers of AP Stat in our local schools to use these resources, and they instead rely on the pre-canned solutions by the commercial publishers. Learning R would be truly terrifying for them, way out of the comfort zone of standardized high school instruction. The current course materials advocate the use of Minitab and graphing calculators that high school teachers swear by. What it would take to have the College Board (the developer of AP Stat tests) to move to the XXI century and suggest R is beyond me; in some ways, they are bound to continue relying on calculators as that's the portable non-Internet technology you can allow on a test, unlike a computer with R installed on it. I don't have any solutions, I am just reporting the symptoms. And I am sure I am just scratching the surface of what many ASA educators have already been addressing for the past 20 or so years of the AP Statistics existence. -- Stas Kolenikov, PhD, PStat (ASA, SSC) -- Principal Survey Scientist, Abt SRBI -- Education Officer, Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association -- Opinions stated in this email are mine only, and do not reflect the position of my employer -- http://stas.kolenikov.name On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 5:41 AM, Hadley Wickham <[email protected]> wrote: >> I agree that R-SIG-Teaching is an appropriate place to keep this >> topic going. To us non-Americans, can you explain "AP >> Statistics" to us and possibly use URLs when you mention >> websites? > > AP = advanced placement. It's an advanced high-school class that > students can elect to take (typically in their final year) and that > often counts for university credit (i.e. in many universities a good > score in an AP class allows you to skip one of the intro level > classes). > > Hadley > > -- > http://hadley.nz > > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
