AP's versus our curriculum

Interesting issue has come up recently in school. Found out that colleges check out the scores our students get on their AP portfolio and compare them to the grades we give them in our classes. For instance, if the average score of our students in AP 3D design is a 4.2 and I happen to give them a B- average for my AP Ceramics class, then my ceramics program would be valued at a much higher rate than if my students averaged a 2.8 on the AP and I gave them an A- (my course would effectively be considered a joke...and probably for good reason)

So, the implications for this seem to be:

1. Discourage kids who we know will do poorly (and even average) on the AP from submitting their portfolio. Only 4's and 5's should take it.

The big issue is we don't know what grade a kid will get. My best student in 15 years of teaching received a 4, while one of my most distracted, unproductive kid received a 3 - both were scores they received were jokes! My grades for them (A and C+) respectively both hurt and helped my program - but not in the way I thought...

2. Lower the grades of my students.

We already have a difficult time as it is attracting students to stay with the visual arts into the upper levels because colleges don't value the class in the same way they do other courses of study. If we were to lower their GPA's artificially, we would lose them altogether...

The college admissions process...

The University of Sydney taken from Trekearth.com

One of the things that we think about here at our school is how the college admissions process shapes how we do business as a school. One of the things we seems to debate is whether the high school learning process is valued in and of itself or if it is merely valued as the vehicle to get one into college.

Recently, one of our college councilors had an argument with a college admissions officer from a prominent New England small college. Essentially, the argument was over what was the true GPA of the student in question. Our view was that the entire transcript had earned the kid his/her GPA while the CA officer was only concerned with "the essential 5": math, English, history, science, foreign language.

My first reaction was to think about the colleges and their own visual and performing arts faculty/facilities/curriculum. For these liberal arts colleges, who are they hoping will fill this part of their campus? Are they drafting any artists/musicians/actors etc to fill these spots? How do these schools approach this end of education? Do they value certain parts of their own school over others?

It just seems to me like we are swinging the education pendulum towards a automatons and valuing only what we can measure. My hope is that this discussion will help figure out ways we can value the things that we can not "fill in a bubble" about: Expeditionary Learning, Aesthetics, Studio Based Learning, Community Based Learning, Brainstorming, Problem Solving etc. If you followed the link in the last post, the website for the conference at the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts is an excellent resource for beginning this conversation...