Learning Productivity and Advanced Placement

The 1997 Almanac of the Chronicle for Higher Education  summarized the 1994 to 1996 changes in state appropriations to higher education and the nine most frequent legislative issues affecting colleges. During that time six states had a decline in appropriations, and ten states had increases of 5% or less, yielding an extremely small annual increase for the three year period. New York State appropriations had the largest decline in state funding with a drop of 10%.

Among the types of legislative action, productivity concerns were common. The productivity related policies and the number of states who passed legislation in this area were as follows: prepaid tuition (28), increased out of state tuition (11), surcharges for excess courses (7), fully articulated core curricula (27), performance based budgeting (21), prohibitions for increasing resident tuition (15), and faculty workload studies (18). The latter two were enacted in New York. Clearly, the mood was first, to provide voters with some economic relief via prepaid tuition plans, frozen tuition levels, and increased cost for nonresidents; and second, to require accountability of institutions: faculty workload studies, performance based budgeting, surcharges for excess credit, and articulated core curricula. Moves toward more uniform general education requirements (a policy which the State University of New York System has since adopted) and surcharges for excess credits reflected the commitment to facilitate the movement of students through the colleges as efficiently as possible.

Higher education is being pressed to provide greater accountability and service with decreasing resources. One of the ways to meet this challenge could be through demonstrations of increased learning productivity, that is enhancing learning outcomes. Since learning productivity focuses on how institutions can reform their structures and policies to provide for more enhanced learning and more timely degree completion, any policies or mechanisms which facilitate student progress in these ways should be fully understood and considered for all campuses, most especially public ones.

The forty-three year old College Board sponsored Advanced Placement Program (AP), recognized on nearly every American campus, could with careful analysis be utilized as one means to achieve this. AP research is abundant, but very few studies assess precisely how students use AP credit in degree pursuit nor the implications for campus productivity. A case study of Binghamton University of the State University of New York explored AP use for students who entered in 1990 with 12 or more AP credits. Using transcripts and Degree Audit Reports (DARS) for 216 students, an analysis identified precisely how students used AP toward their degrees. Policy records were reviewed and interviews with university personnel were conducted to assess Binghamton’s effectiveness in using AP to promote learning productivity.

The research examined these issues and determined that of the sample: 1) 30% completed more ambitious programs including double majors or degrees and minors; 2) over 90% used AP credit for college requirements; 3) no student completed credit that duplicated AP work and 46 earned some AP credit that met no requirement; 4) 19.4% graduated with excess credit above the minimum degree requirement; and 5) early graduation was achieved in less than four years by 8.3% while another 165 or 76.4%
graduated in four years. The amount of AP credit and graduation date correlated negatively and significantly for native students. There was no significant relationship between the amount of AP and excess credit.

Despite the more productive learning evidenced through the completion of more enhanced programs, broad use for college requirements, and timely or early graduation, institutional policy on AP was highly decentralized and governed solely by a system wide credit guarantee for scores of three. Binghamton policy on AP was not based on any overriding goals. Campus personnel involved in shaping and implementing academic policy all spoke highly of the value of AP to the individual student and especially to the institution in evaluating applicants, but opinions varied on whether shortened or facilitated time to degree was really advantageous to the student since they might miss valuable Binghamton experiences. No studies of AP use in degree pursuit had been undertaken with the exception of how many students had completed AP math exams.

Timely or Early Graduation
While facilitated time to degree was only one of the questions under study in the Binghamton sample, it is useful to consider in more detail since shortening the time it takes to complete the bachelors degree has been a focus throughout the history of higher education. Since the seventeenth century at Harvard College to concerns voiced today, educators, parents, and more recently legislators have maintained that students usually spend too much time completing their degrees and something should be done about it. In the State University of New York System, issues of accountability have defined time to degree as one of 7 indicators by which to measure performance.  One such assessment involved the comparison of SUNY undergraduate graduation rates with other public peer institutions. The standard was the average time it took students to graduate within 6 years or 150% of the traditional period of four years.  For the class that entered in 1987, among the doctoral research institutions, the rate was 65% at SUNY compared to 62.5, nationally.  The class that entered Binghamton University in 1990 graduated 64.01% by the end of four years, not six.  Binghamton exceeded the rates at the other university centers of SUNY, the entire system average of 39.64%,  and the nationwide six year rate.

In another national persistence study, the 1989 entering class, just one year ahead of the Binghamton sample, the average time to complete the baccalaureate degree for students who stayed at their original institutions was 41 months (four and one-half years) or five months more than the traditional 36 months using a nine month academic year.

For the 216 students under study, 183 or 84.72% completed their degree within four years or 36 months; well above Binghamton’s average graduation rate of 64.01% and the national average of 41 months. When the sample was further refined to account
for the advantage that transfer credit might provide, the graduation rate still surpassed the Binghamton average with 155 native students or 71.8% graduating in four years or less.

Time to degree was certainly one of the concerns that led to the development of AP, although at that time in the 1950’s, it focused more on how higher education would address the disruption in study when students were drafted for the Korean war. This did not prevail for very long as a major consideration, but time to degree has persisted as a problem which the College Board still asserts AP can address.

This claim seems to have an appealing logic. Students entering college with enough credits would have fewer to complete and would therefore finish more quickly. However, despite more than 40 years of AP history, the evidence is sporadic and not convincing. The Binghamton sample does suggest though that AP can be a factor if academic policies permit liberal use of the credit even when there is no overall campus goal of encouraging such an effect.

Advanced Placement, Learning Productivity and the Future
As has been said, learning productivity focuses on how institutions can reform their structures and policies to provide for more enhanced learning and more timely degree completion. Advanced Placement in this one institutional study was found to be a contributor to such purposes. While differences among institutions might not result in this same outcome elsewhere, selective public, liberal arts institutions of equivalent size to Binghamton would be likely candidates for comparable studies.

AP credit is not available in every high school and not appropriate to every high school student, but capable students do not take all the AP that is available to them. However, many states are taking steps to encourage expanded AP programs in secondary schools.  If colleges analyzed the AP benefits on their campuses, alterations in policy could encourage more utility for AP credit. This would demonstrate benefits and encourage more students to pursue this type of college level learning in secondary schools, and more high schools and states to expand offerings of AP courses. Studying the effects of campus AP policies would be the first step in promoting learning productivity aims.

Other national research could further the investigation of institutional policies to discover what patterns exist in the granting of credit and whether there are trends which have an effect on the utilization of AP credit. Research recently completed at the University of Buffalo on statewide mandates for recognition of such credit is the first important step for this kind of research.

The College Board can help with this effort to enhance learning productivity by undertaking national research on AP use in colleges and universities by region, type of institutions, and volume of AP credit reported. This information like that which individual campuses document, must be fully presented. Timely completion within four years or less is an impressive accomplishment worthy of advertising, should be one of many approaches utilized to further this effort.

Conclusion
AP can serve as a contributing factor in addressing learning productivity goals. A public selective institution with students who have completed substantial AP should review its AP policies, how students are using their AP credit, how these students compare with non-AP students, and utilize the findings to publicize and encourage greater learning productivity.

College level learning in high school is an expanding frontier, especially in the area of dual enrollments or credit validation programs. Some selective institutions are skeptical of this credit and will not award credit for college coursework completed at the high school. In this context, AP has a more standardized and recognized history. What it needs now is greater attention to the real track record that it has been accumulating in the years of utilization by students. Studies which document real application toward degrees will enhance the role that AP and college level learning plays in helping students and institutions.

AP will not eradicate the need for remedial work in college, prevent transferring, stopping out, or other behaviors that prolong degree pursuit and expend higher educational resources. Like retention efforts, no one change or program will correct the problems, rather, many strategies are required. Advanced Placement though can be one contributing factor at certain institutions and for selective students if the policies for recognizing credit and using it for degree requirements are studies and purposively structured.

About the Author: Elaine R. Cusker, Ph.D. is the Coordinator of Preprofessional Health Advising Academic Advisement Center at The State University of New York at Buffalo.
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