I taught AP English Literature & Composition for a few years, and for the past five I've been teaching AP English Language & Composition.

I've always had a conflicted relationship to AP exam scores. I know that getting a 3-5 can save students from a little college debt. I know parents and families value good scores. I know students see their score as a reflection of how hard they worked and how good the class was. I know they're important for those reasons, and I always want to do everything I can to help the students get ready.

But I will NOT teach to the test. I am going to explore philosophy, and life, and the political implications of language, and the amusing idiosyncrasies of words, and the history of slang, and a thousand other really important aspects of the field. In the big picture of their lives, a student's exam score is one tiny number based on one three-hour experience from one day.

I did my undergraduate study at a place with no grades. That intellectual freedom provided me with the self-discipline that made me into the scholar I am today. I want to get my students working toward that same authentic evolution of the mind. It rarely happens when kids are fixated on grades and numbers and points and transcripts. Most classes I teach have no BIG TEST at the end of the year with such a significant material payoff. In Creative Writing, I can focus on authentic learning without sweating the grades and numbers. But obviously AP classes are different.

Last year my mean scores were slightly below the state and national average, but the % of students who did not achieve a 3 or better was 20 points below those averages. I was crushed. The cohort I worked with seemed especially unmotivated, and I know there's only so much I can (or can be expected to) do. (The teacher who worked with that cohort this year confirmed that her expectations for scores was not high.) Still, I know my students, and I know that some of them worked really hard only to get a 2 or, in some cases, a 1.

I couldn't help feeling like I failed them somehow. Maybe I should be more rigid. (My school district makes this tough, with lots of weak policies driven by a misguided approach to fighting inequities — a goal I share, so it's especially frustrating to see our schools "killing kids with kindness", so to speak. We claim to be "warm demanders" but we teachers aren't able to demand much at all.) Maybe I should assign more homework. Maybe I should overload them with more practice tests and data crunching and flash cards and vocabulary quizzes like so many other teachers do. Maybe maybe maybe.

When I checked my scores this morning, I was especially nervous. I had made some adjustments to my class, and I was proud of the increased levels of rigor I implemented without changing the fundamental balance of the course. Fortunately, this year's cohort did better; the % who got a 3+ was significantly closer to the state and national average. Still below, which isn't great, but not nearly as bad as last year. The overall mean, meanwhile, is almost identical to state and national average.

So I'm feeling better. I know that many of those who got a 1 or 2 didn't work very hard, didn't put in a lot of extra study time, didn't read many books. I also know — and I tell my students — that they are not spending a year preparing for this exam. They've spent ten years preparing for it (or not).

But there are still some who did work hard this year, who did read a lot, who did seek extra help. I know that so many things can happen to cause an Unjust Score, and I'll never be 100% satisfied about my relationship to the scores. I just hate the thought that I'm not being rigorous enough. I hate thinking like I'm not doing enough to help the motivated students get ready.

So tell me your thoughts. If you teach (or taught) AP classes, how do you relate to exam scores? How do you handle this unique balancing act?

EDIT: I should say I won't only teach to the test. Obviously I structure my class around the test, in order to cover the material in the MC and FRQ sections. But I'm not doing all test prep all the time. There's a lot more to language than just knowing the difference between a zeugma and a synecdoche.

EDIT 2: If you have never taught an AP class, this post is clearly not aimed at you. Obviously it can be valuable for other folks to share their perspectives, but I'm sensing a profound lack of awareness and empathy from many responses here, which suggests many of you have no idea what teaching an AP class is like. Which is why I worded my post as I did.

If those of you posting such judgmental replies communicate this way with your colleagues IRL, then I feel sorry for your colleagues. However you feel about my approach to teaching this one class, you are not doing a good job of teaching me how to be a better teacher. (You know, if that was your intention.)

Finally: Page 127 of the AP Lang Course Overview — 135 in the PDF — says: "Typical responses that earn 0 points […] do not address the prompt". So everyone who did not discuss your relationship to test scores.. I dunno.. seems like perhaps you're not doing what the College Board requires?

Can our ap teacher view our scores or only the ap coordinator of the school?

So teachers get score reports that show, for each FRQ question, the mean score that their students received. For example, let's say a teacher had 20 students take the AP Calculus AB exam. For each of the six FRQ questions, there would be a mean score (from 0 to 9 points) that's calculated using all of the 20 students' individual scores for that question. Here's a link to a sample pdf on CB's website if you want to see what a full report might look like.

Now my question is what if only one student or few students took an exam or a particular version of an exam? This is common for AP Calculus where only some students might take the BC exam. Would teachers receive the mean scores for this small number of students or even one student? Because this would obviously be much more revealing and would be the only way, to my knowledge, to access one's score on a specific question of an ap exam. I haven't be able to find an answer to this after doing some research.

I'm very curious about what our AP teachers see on their end. My stats teacher this year said he can see our state performance compared to global performance and see how previous students did.