AP is a good illustration of the way unintended consequences emerge when we structure various rewards to behaviors (or game-able metrics) . . . and the unintended consequences vary with the way we structure the payoff.
Two examples: My daughter attended an out-of-state residential high school for the arts during her junior year. This school used its AP pass rates (percentage of students taking the exam who earned a 3 , 4 or 5) to document the quality of its academics. She wanted to take the AP French exam at the end of her junior year but the school would not allow her to do so, worried that she might not get a sufficiently high score (this is the reason they gave her when they refused her request). (BTW, she took the exam the following year and earned a score that would have made them happy, but her "home" high school in Pensacola reaped the credit for the quality of her French.) This school attends to a metric (percent who take the test and pass) and takes a conservative approach to allowing attempts at the test to maximize this metric. In Florida, the State reimburses high schools for every score (I think a 3 or higher) earned by a student from that school who takes an AP or IB exam (payoffs by the raw number of passing scores, not the percentage of students with passing scores). The IB program my daughter attended earned enough money from the State reimbursements to pay the fees for all of the tests the students took each spring (no direct cost to the students) and fund the salaries of two full-time IB teachers. At this school, if a student was enrolled in an AP or IB course, they were required to take the relevant test. A low score costs the school nothing except the fee and the payoff if the student does well is substantially more than the cost of the test and proctoring. The school has a revenue stream. This is the pattern throughout Florida public high schools. The less motivated/prepared students and the students from schools that won't even buy the kids books (if we believe the comments they write instead of writing answers to the essay) draw pictures of cars or their prom dress, write poetry, write bitter diatribes about their cheap school, etc. When the system is set up in this way, a school system that is starved for funding will game the system to bring in extra funds. If you make enough students take the exams, those who might not be perfectly prepared might just get lucky and pass. The economics of the system rewards making that gamble. Psychology and economics. I can't say I blame these schools, although I have some thoughts about those schools that won't purchase books for the classes. I doubt they have much of a revenue stream through reimbursements for high scores, either. Claudia _____________________________________________ Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor NSF UWF Faculty ADVANCE Scholar School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 – 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 (direct) or 473-7435 (CUTLA) [email protected] CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=23871 or send a blank email to leave-23871-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
