High schools often offer students the opportunity to take Advanced Placements (AP) courses which claim to be similar in calliber to college courses. AP courses tend to require less comprehension of the material than college courses do, leaving many students unprepared for rigorous college work loads (Abhi Brar/ruffdraft).
There is a fundamental flaw with high school curriculum: the lack of preparation it gives students for college.
When I first arrived to Geneseo, I decided to be a math major after taking AP Calc and AP Statistics my senior year of high school. I enjoyed math, but I particularly enjoyed statistics because it enabled me to give data meaning, which I thought was very interesting.
A problem I had in high school, however, was that I never had to study in order to succeed in the classroom. I only did my homework and never went the extra mile to study, so when I got to Geneseo I assumed I could continue this routine. Boy was I wrong.
Not only did the workload hit me hard, but so did the pace. In high school you have a whole year to understand material, but you get half that time in college. Couple this with my continued lack of study habits and I was destined to fail.
I was never taught how to study in high school, and I suffered immensely my first couple of semesters here because I was too embarrassed to seek help. Ultimately, I had to drop the math major because I fell too far behind to keep up with the material.
I attribute this partly to the format of the AP exams as well. The AP grading scale is simply just a number between one and five that you are given depending on how well you do. Typically, college credit is given to someone who scores a three or higher on an exam, however, students aim for a five as this is more likely to guarantee college credit.
The problem with the AP formatting is that you do not even need to get a 90 percent on the test in order to score a five on many exams. For instance, in 2013, students taking the Calculus AB, Calculus BC and AP Statistics exams only needed to score a 63 percent for a five on the exam, according to The College Board. This is a flawed system that hurt me my first two semesters at Geneseo because, rather than attempting to master the material, I tried to understand 70 percent of it because that was all I needed to get to achieve the highest score on the AP exam.
This past summer I was an Orientation Leader, which required me to go through six orientation sessions. This meant that I sat through each speech given by different members of the staff six times.
These speeches each had a basic premise to them: you all (the new students) were probably the best students in your school, you probably understood material faster than other students and other messages that essentially conveyed the same idea. These messages led to a bigger message: that college is a different animal compared to high school.
While I agree with that message, having been to orientation seven times—including my freshman orientation—I can assure you that not everyone in the audience was paying attention. This is a problem considering that college is a new experience for new students with all new freedoms and a newfound lack of accountability.
I think the solution to this problem is having high schools better prepare students for college. This could be accomplished by teaching different note-taking techniques, helping to develop study habits or by giving students resources that can help them in their future college endeavors; it is important that high schools do this.
High school is usually seen as the steppingstone on someone’s way to achieving higher education. If this is the case, why do they not help students develop or learn habits for their collegiate future?
If a student is a first-generation college student, perhaps the best way to gather information about college would be from their high school’s staff. My parents were college graduates of SUNY Albany, and if it were not for them, I would not have been able to change my habits the way I have been able to. I think it is essential that both high schools and colleges provide students with resources to help them succeed in and out of the classroom.
Specifically, I believe that if high schools were to incorporate procedures and programs to help prospective college students with the college workload, then those students would be more successful in college.