Now writing this, I am completely open to the idea of one of the board members reading this and demolishing all of my AP scores because I spoke out against your monopoly, but jokes on you, I’ve already gotten credit and placement for all of my AP classes.

Don’t get me wrong, you gave me the opportunity a lot of students don’t get to have. Without AP I would have never been able to take college level courses in high school. It is a great opportunity. But I strongly urge you to reconsider actions that have recently been taken. However, when you pay almost 100 dollars per exam, and everyone in your class gets the exact same form, it makes you think how much time these people are really spending in making this monopoly.

Recently, this monopoly has been vastly reduced. The International Baccalaureate Diploma, ACT and ACP program have played vital roles in doing this. Still, students would rather take “easier” classes that are still full weight and get more college credit in the end than sitting through a year of an intense class and getting a simple three credit hours of elective credit that ends up not doing much for their major at all. The ACP program is offered through IU where students can take a variety of different courses, more similar to the IU course than AP and get real life credit for their major. This is different from AP because students actually take the IU midterms and final exams rather than an AP test from years prior that teachers take and give to their students as practice.

But what is so wrong with all of this is the vast difference in classes from teacher to teacher within the same school. If you want the programs to be taught a certain way with certain standards, there needs to be a College Board standard as well, where teachers grade equally and provide students an equal opportunity to earn the AP score of three or higher in order to get credit, even if it is only elective credit. Even with all of my AP exams I have taken from my freshman to junior years, I pass out of classes that I would never have taken anyway, that, in reality, have no real life application to my major.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Gabby Perelmuter at [email protected].