A few AP classes on campus will bump grades depending on the AP test score. For instance, in AP Chemistry or AP Statistics, if you get a 5 on the AP exam your grade can be bumped to an A, a B for a 4, and a C for a 3. Every Dublin High AP Class should do this for the 2020-2021 school year. 

This should happen for 2 key reasons.

First, it’s a recommendation from College Board. Every AP course description made by College Board has the following graphic on it -- they recommend the exact scheme present in AP Chem and Stats and literally designed AP Exams to reflect this preferred grading scheme. In their “About AP” sections at the beginning of each of their course descriptions they explain a variety of reasons as to why AP exams are crafted to reflect these grading schemes. In so far as Dublin High teaches College Board’s curriculum in preparation for their AP Exam, the grades in those AP Classes should reflect the exam scores.

Second, many students’ grades do not reflect their capabilities because of distance learning. Distance learning has 2 distinct impacts on lower grades for AP students. First, there is far less instruction time. In a normal school year, each class has about 5 hours of teaching minutes, whereas with the new distance learning schedule it’s only 2.5 hours. While other fairly rigorous classes like Honors Chemistry and Precalculus were able to cut parts of their curriculum to reflect that change, AP Classes could not. This is because the teachers still need to prepare students for an AP Exam that encompasses the entire nationwide curriculum, not a version modified to fit Dublin’s new accommodations. This means that in several AP classes there is drastically less time for students to practice problems, and more importantly, learn the curriculum from their teachers. Several AP classes have had many chapters assigned as asynchronous work, forcing students to self-study. While office hours were a great way to try and make up that difference, it can never make up for actual class time. This was so detrimental because it forced AP students to adjust way more than any other student. Not only did they have to adjust to a wholly new online learning environment, they had to change their study and learning habits. Especially for students who greatly benefitted from teacher lectures, they had to spend far more time than they usually would have learning the material and often wouldn't be able to do so with the same quality. Allowing for grades to reflect AP scores solves this problem because AP students would have mastered the curriculum by the end of the year. While they were playing catch up they weren’t able to prove this mastery on individual unit tests but could have done so on the AP test. Second, students faced lots of mental health struggles that were much harder to handle or support in distance learning. Being stuck in the home isn’t always a great scenario and for many students not being able to meet with peers amplified any problems at home. Combine this with the fact that it was much harder to get support from a digital Wellness Center. Overall, this year has been one of the worst for students on an emotional and mental health front. This means that many couldn’t submit assignments or weren’t in the right mental state for certain tests that dropped their grade. This however, does not mean that they did not master the content. By the time they found a way to cope it could have been too late for their grade -- but not too late to show their mastery on the AP test.

If they got a high AP test score it means they mastered the curriculum for the entire year, which is what grades are supposed to reflect. Grades are supposed to represent mastery of curriculum, but instead this year they represented how you dealt with newfound stressors without help and what your learning style is. AP exams, however, solely represented mastery of curriculum. This year, AP exams did what grades were supposed to do. We highly encourage AP exam scores to reflect grades across all AP classes at DHS.