Advanced Placement’s Role in Developing Exceptional Human Capital

We evaluated the Advanced Placement (AP) program from the point of view of intellectually precocious youth and their subsequent educational-vocational outcomes, analyzing normative and idiographic longitudinal data collected across 30 years from 3,937 participants. Most took AP courses in high school, and those who did frequently nominated an AP course as their favorite. Students who took AP courses, compared with their intellectual peers who did not, appeared more satisfied with the intellectual caliber of their high school experience and, ultimately, achieved more. Overall, this special population placed a premium on intellectual challenge in high school and found the lack of such challenge distressing. These findings can inform contemporary educational policy debates regarding the AP program; they also have general implications for designing and evaluating educational interventions for students with special needs. Intellectually talented students are an extraordinary national resource, and much research supports the importance of providing them with specialized learning environments to meet their unique intellectual and socioemotional needs (Benbow & Stanley, 1996; Reis, 1989). The Advanced Placement (AP) program affords one such learning environment (Stanley & Benbow, 1982). AP is viewed as the best large-scale option currently available for challenging academically prepared youth while they are still in high school (Benbow & Stanley, 1983; National Research Council, NRC, 2002). Not only does it provide bright, highly motivated students with an opportunity to take advanced coursework and receive college credit, but it is also typically advantageous socially because it allows them to experience high school life with their sameage peers. Historically, AP has provided gifted students with the appropriate developmental placement (Lubinski & Benbow, 2000) that all students require for optimal learning: a curriculum that progresses at a pace commensurate with one’s rate of learning. Since its inception (1955), and over the past three decades in particular, the AP program has grown tremendously. By the year 2000, for example, the program included 32 courses and exams, with 60% of high schools offering at least one AP course and over a third of college-bound seniors participating (College Entrance Examination Board, CEEB, 2001). This growth is expected to continue until AP courses are available in 100% of the nation’s high schools (CEEB, 2001). The rapid growth of the AP program, however, has led to various concerns. A recent report on advanced study in America’s high schools (NRC, 2002) expressed concern that the shortage of qualified AP teachers is growing and that current AP classes tend to emphasize breadth of coverage over depth of understanding. Educators also have questioned a current tendency for selective institutions to employ AP coursework as a criterion for undergraduate admission (NRC, 2002); simultaneously, some universities are increasingly reluctant to grant college credit for anything other than the top score on AP exams (Matthews, 2002). In addition, the rapid expansion of the AP program has led some educators to wonder if AP has compromised its rigor (Lichten, 2000), and what effects continued growth may have on the program and the students it serves (CEEB, 2001; NRC, 2002). In this report, we ask: What does the AP program do for students? And what are the potential implications of recent changes surrounding the AP program? Probably the most appropriate population for answering these questions is that for which AP was originally designed—highly motivated and intellectually talented students. In this report, we examine intellectually talented students’ feelings about high school and their educational outcomes 15 years later as a function of their AP involvement.