Excessive Pressure to Take Advanced Placement Courses

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Let me take you back to being a sophomore in high school: fifteen-about-to-turn-sixteen-year-olds, beginning thoughts of college just blooming in their minds, and they are taking more challenging classes than ever before. Every year, classes are changed in schools in order to fulfill new requirements and the difficulty is increased in order to challenge the new students. These new classes and the amount of choices students now have between the different classes available now put new pressures on students that the older generations may not understand. Not only do students have the choice of electives, but now they have the choice of different mathematics, sciences, and English courses on a range of sometimes four different levels. With all these choices, students may have a hard time deciding which is the proper course and level to take. Unfortunately, there is one more pressure in the mix of this decision: the pressure to take advanced placement (AP) courses. More students are taking AP classes every year but the number of students who “bomb the AP exams is growing even more rapidly” (Simon). This leads into the idea that students are not getting more intelligent than the previous classes, but simply that there is too much pressure on them to take these AP courses. Students in high school are being pressured too much to take advanced placement courses whether or not they are academically qualified for them.
Parents play a huge part in the decision making process in their children’s education. The parents almost always want what they think is best for their children and sometimes the parents do not know where to draw the line between assisting their child and controlling their children’s lives. When discussing course choices in hi...

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...e clearly pressured many different ways to take these advanced placement courses. Although most schools have a system in place in which a student needs a teacher’s recommendation to take the class, the teacher may be giving a student who is not ready for the course permission for other reasons. Students should be recommended to take courses in which they feel challenged but not overwhelmed. Advanced placement courses are becoming more and more the norm in high schools eve if the students who take them are not necessarily ready for that level of class. It is important that we keep students feeling encouraged to take courses that challenge them but not courses that they are pressured into taking. Parents, teachers, and peers are all pressures in this topic but everyone needs to make sure that the most important aspect of school is the education the student is getting.

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