For over 60 years, educators graded Advanced Placement English exam essays according to holistic guidelines, with open-ended rubrics that enabled them to use their knowledge and discretion to measure the success of students' choices as writers. Starting next spring, however, the College Board will move from a nine-point holistic rubric to a new six-point analytic rubric that functions as a checklist. Gone from the course bulletins are long-standing warnings against teaching to the tests, and indeed these rubrics will encourage and reward simplistic, formulaic thinking.
Now, students may be able to receive college credit and place out of introductory writing courses without understanding that writing has anything to do with intentionality, thoughtfulness or clear thinking. More than ever, the essays will not measure a meaningful grasp of the writing process, but a basic ability to conform and regurgitate. Importantly, the new rubrics also restrict graders from making qualitative judgments that require knowledge and trust.
While the AP brand signals reliability and continuity, this change is just the latest sign that the program has dramatically departed from its roots over the past decade, weakening the quality of education and threatening to turn the AP into a shell of its former self.
These recent curricular changes represent a sharp break from the AP program's conceptual foundation. In 1948, as the Cold War developed, Harvard President James Conant called for sweeping educational reforms. In "Education in a Divided World," he warned against thinking of people in terms of "economic symbols," as he claimed Soviets did.
Instead, he argued, Americans "must analyze our problems ... in terms of human motives, of social ideals, and the relation of these ideals to a well-formed picture of the future of the nation." In line with Cold War liberal ideals, Conant advocated for an educational system that fostered the kinds of social relationships that, to his mind, marked healthy democracy. "The relation between the structure of our society and our educational system is reciprocal, of course," he wrote. Conant's book inspired educators to develop programs designed to train gifted students to contribute to public welfare.
In line with Conant's concern for preserving democracy in the face of communism, early proponents of these new curriculums imagined strong liberal arts programs in secondary schools. One group of educators explained, "One of the glories of our society is the value which we attach to human differences and to the right of each person to grow according to his own bent, to achieve his own kind of excellence." Accordingly, composition assumed a place of pride in the curriculum. The bulletin announcing the first slate of exams in 1954 encouraged teachers "to know and deal with each of his pupils as a thinking individual," and to think of "writing not as a means to an end but as an intrinsically valuable process of mental self-exploration and orientation."
In the first year of the program, which launched in a small number of America's top prep and public schools, the English exams included a variety of writing tasks, each designed to train students to engage with information in different ways. The hope was to simultaneously strengthen and diversify students' skill sets as readers, writers and independent thinkers.
Conant's vision — and the original plans for the Advanced Placement program — embraced teacher autonomy, which necessarily produced unequal outcomes, as no two teachers would see things exactly the same way. But this attitude left the door open to a more pernicious inequality, shaped by bias and bigotry. While Conant's book had included specific plans for ameliorating racial tension, critics like Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke had lamented Conant's "concessions to local initiative and control" because widening equality "will involve a snail's pace gradualism."