April 25, 2023

Earlier this year I read that the College Board would offer a new AP course in Precalculus beginning in the fall of 2023. What struck me right away was that, in my mind, Precalculus isn’t an “Advanced” course. The last I checked, the “A” in AP stood for Advanced. If a student takes the course as a freshman or sophomore in high school, they might be considered to be on the advanced math track, but taking a test offered by the College Board for a tenth-grade math class just didn’t add up in my mind, let alone taking it as an eleventh or twelfth grader.

On its website, the College Board states that adopting AP Precalculus is: “Preparing a wider range of students to succeed in math they’ll encounter in college.” The first bullet point under the category of Why Offer AP Precalculus states: “…the opportunity to earn college credit and/or placement and stand out to colleges.” (I might also note that on all three pictures on the AP Precalulus webpage, someone is holding a Texas Instruments calculator. All three. You can read my opinion on that in my next article.)

Really?  I can’t see many colleges or universities giving credit for a Precalculus class. Stand out? With even the most selective schools opting now to go “test-optional”, is this course and this test really allowing a student to stand out? Maybe I am missing something but to be sure I can’t come up with one valid reason to believe this would be something worth pursuing for a high school math student.

I decided I needed to reach out to other people in education to get their opinion. I solicited input from current and former college counselors at independent schools, guidance counselors at both large and small public high schools, current heads of schools, and college admission offices at both public and private institutions to get their feedback. Not surprisingly, the most common theme in all of my correspondence was “money grab”, “another way to make money”, and one simple response, “$$$$”. In an effort to subsidize the loss of money that the pandemic created, the College Board is literally “doing anything possible to try to stay afloat and make money.”

With college campuses seeing a drop in applications, and pandemic-age high school students not wanting to go into debt, I believe we need to rethink the traditional approach to math as it relates to college and life. Instead of trying to reward the driven student already on their way to succeeding at a higher level of math with a five on a placement test as a sophomore, why not redirect our efforts to answering the age-old question, “When am I ever going to use this?”

Honestly. Why can’t we decide it is ok for a “college-bound” student to see the real-world applications of mathematics through the lens of the humanities, liberal arts, and even something like sports? Wouldn’t those colleges and universities struggling to fill their beds benefit from a high school math curriculum that prepares a student to problem solve and work collaboratively with others?

I recently gave a presentation at OESIS Las Vegas on “Using Free Tools to Analyze Authentic Math Data.” I love this topic and how it evolved beginning 25 years ago with my former math chair asking me to teach, of all things, a Precalculus class to our “terminal” math seniors. This would be twelfth graders and a few postgraduates who would never take another math course in college but needed math as a senior at our school.

Having these students buy a graphing calculator, and spend money on an antiquated textbook seemed cruel to me. Having implemented a one-to-one laptop program in the late ’90s… I knew that my students already had what they needed to engage them in “something more than Algebra II, but not Calculus” as the course description had been explained to me.

Using real-life examples, real-life data, and real-time numbers intrigued my students and engaged them. I felt obligated to prepare more diligently than ever before, trying to make sure that my students would be thoroughly engaged with the true application of whatever “math” we were supposedly learning.

To me, this is much more meaningful than giving a participation trophy to the student who pays money to sit for a test as a sophomore.

Just my two cents!

You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Marcus Muster for Intrepid Ed News.