Changing the Course

The College Board announced at the end of the 2017-2018 school year that it would be changing the AP Government test, and so the class is currently undergoing a redesign.

While the curriculum itself has seen no major changes, the AP test will now be shifted more towards assessing students’ critical-thinking skills, rather than primarily asking knowledge-based questions. However, the College Board has not provided AP Government teachers with all of the testing resources that they have had access to in the past, according to AP Government teacher Ron Stallard.

Although a few resources have been released by the College Board, many of the free-response prompts and test banks of multiple-choice questions Stallard had planned to use in order to prepare students for the new, analytical-thinking questions and prompts are not yet available. As of now, Stallard only has one 55-question multiple-choice practice exam structured around the redesign and five to 10 other questions from various other sources, while he usually has 1000 potential questions he can choose from throughout the year. While the College Board is expected to release more throughout the year, there is no guarantee that students will have access to these resources until next August, Stallard said.

Despite the current lack of resources, Stallard agrees with the new method of assessment the College Board is implementing. Instead of simply asking what facts students know, the questions will require test-takers to use reasoning to draw a conclusion based off of prior knowledge. In addition to this, testers will be expected to write a quantitative analysis and an argumentative essay — all in an attempt to make students more successful analytical thinkers.

“I think it’s going to make students that graduate after taking AP Gov much more successful in college and in the workplace, because it’s not so much anymore ‘what do you know?’ because we can Google anything,” Stallard said. “. . . Now they’re moving to critical thinking and analytical thinking which is awesome. It’s just that they didn’t give us the resources, I think, to prepare the students.”

Currently, Stallard and the other AP Government teachers across the district, such as Tony Budetti at SM South, are relying heavily on multiple-choice questions and free-response questions from previous years. According to AP consultant John Unruh-Friesen, the test will still be a mixture of reasoning-based and knowledge-based questions, so many of the questions from previous years will still be applicable. However, Budetti is concerned that since the majority of their resources are from before the redesign, the practice questions will not exactly mimic the test.

“If you’re somebody who really teaches toward the test, it really puts you in a tight situation, because you haven’t seen the test,” Budetti said. “You don’t know what the test is going to be exactly. We don’t know what the format of all of the questions are exactly going to look like.”

The lack of updated resources coupled with the fact that teachers are in the process of learning the changes has caused some concern over students’ ability to do well on the AP test. The lack of resources only adds to this concern, according to AP Government student and senior Amanda Anderson. She fears that students will not be able to do as well as they have in previous years as the teachers adjust to the changes.

“In later years it might be beneficial overall if it helps students learn more effectively, but I think this year is going to be a hot mess,” Anderson said.

Although Stallard was hoping he would have access to more practice questions, he is optimistic that the lack of resources will be taken into account when the AP test is graded this year, especially since the test is curved. He is still making efforts to incorporate practice essays and test questions into his curriculum this year, although he recognizes that this task will likely be far more difficult without materials provided to him. He suspects that developing his own essay prompts and essay questions will be a significant time commitment. For that reason, he is hopeful that teachers across the country will share the supplementary materials they have created and added to their own curriculums.

“If [an essay prompt]’s already prepared for me, it’s going to take me 15 seconds to read it and say, ‘Okay, that’s what they’re looking for,’” Stallard said. “If I have to write one, it takes me a good hour or hour and a half to come up with everything.”

Still, he is confident that as the year goes on, more practice questions will become available to him, and he will be able to incorporate it into his AP test preparation. He just cannot be sure of when.

“The path is going to be a little different than it has been in the past,” Stallard said. “It’s going to be a winding path instead of a straight path this year, because I just don’t know how we’re going to get through it. But I do know we will get through it.”