Ben Scafidi Kennesaw State University The Effects of Academic Rigor in High Schools on Academic Performance in College Ben Scafidi Kennesaw State University

Two Issues Here … Does academic rigor in high school lead to better academic performance in high school? Advanced Placement (AP) Does academic rigor in high school lead to better academic performance in college? EOCT scores as compared to course grades

The AP Program Since 1955, the College Board’s Advanced Placement Program has been offering an avenue by which high school students can earn college level credit. Over 90 percent of four-year colleges and universities accept AP coursework for college credit.

Number of AP Exams Taken in Georgia

How Did Georgia Decide to Promote More AP? State School Superintendent Kathy Cox To improve SAT scores and the percent of students who go to college and succeed in college While there was a push for high schools to offer more AP, there was a decrease in subsidies to students to pay for AP exams. Was this move to AP a good idea?

Advanced Placement (AP) Parents and “lay” people seem to love it. More rigorous standards and potential college credit. Eggheads who study education policy seem to hate it. They do not believe that AP increases student learning Believe that access to AP is inequitable

AP: Is it worth it and who enrolls? Almost all of the evidence finds no benefits; but all of the prior evidence is generated from “less than perfect” approaches. To the extent that taking AP Economics increases student learning, it is worth analyzing disparities in AP Economics course-taking between different groups of students.

2 papers We used two years of data on all high school students who took Georgia’s required economics course and the corresponding end-of-course test.

Does AP Economics Improve Student Learning? Yes. Taking AP Economics seems to boost students scores on the Economics EOCT. 0.283 standard deviations And, the gains in learning from AP Economics seem to be the largest for the students with the lowest prior achievement in mathematics. we endeavored to control for teacher effectiveness, prior achievement, and student selection into AP

Differences in AP Course-Taking Males, low-income, African-American, and Hispanic students are much less likely to be enrolled in AP Economics than other students. Controlling for prior academic achievement in Geometry leads to a “flip” in the gaps between white and African-American students and white and Hispanic students. Low income students only slightly underrepresented. Males under-represented. Asians over-represented. Students living outside of metropolitan Atlanta and students in smaller schools have much less access to AP Economics.

Research results should be translated into policy with care. For example, these results do not necessarily justify universal AP.

Does more academic rigor in high school lead to better academic performance in college? All else equal. How to measure rigor? EOCT Scores/Class Grades Do students with higher EOCT Scores/Grades have higher freshman GPAs in college and higher first year HOPE retention?

“This data leads one to assume that a low EOCT score and a passing grade for the class would indicate grade inflation,” said XXX, assistant superintendent for XXX County Schools. “I do not believe this. I believe the true measure of a student’s progress in any given academic area would be based on the student’s work and participation in that class for the entire year.” “On any given day, a student can fail one test or one assignment and still receive an A in the class. One test cannot offer a complete picture of a student’s knowledge or progress. There are too many variables that can affect the outcome.” Dana Tofig, director of communications for the Georgia Department of Education, also doesn’t see some discrepancy as a major problem. “There’s never going to be perfect alignment between what you see with a classroom grade and what you see on a standardized test,” Tofig said. “It shouldn’t be. A classroom grade takes so much more into account.”

Increase in High School Rigor from the 10th to the 90th Percentile Increases Freshman GPA by 0.19 points Increases probability of retaining HOPE at the end of the first year by 7 percentage points Which is an 18.5 percent increase in HOPE eligibility

Research results should be translated into policy with care. For example, these results do not necessarily justify making good grades harder to come by.