When Queen sang "Under Pressure," it surely wasn't their hair they were singing about.

The NYT is featuring a nice 5-minute mini-documentary called Advanced Pressure that speaks to students, administrators and teachers about the AP program.  I see moments of this pressure myself as kids overload themselves and teeter on the edge as they push through junior and senior years.  None of this is new to high school students and their parents.  And while some of the kids are a bit whiny–NO ONE is forcing anyone to take these classes and there are plenty of students who balance 3 or 4 APs quite deftly–I do hope that more than a handful of admissions officers out there will catch this piece and see the earnestness with which many kids pursue pleasing a system that doesn’t do a very good job of being transparent.

Which reminds me, I did talk about APs at greater length last month, How Many APs Does It Take to Get Into Harvard*, if you’re interested in hearing  a bit more on how I view the program in terms of class selection for hs students.

Attention Students: This is what happens when your load is too heavy.

As high school sophomores and juniors wrap up this semester, many of them start taking an early peek towards their course load in the year to follow.  ”How many AP courses should I take,” inevitably and unfortunately becomes the guiding question to much of the decision-making.  I say unfortunately because of the focus on raising GPAs via the bonus points that are typically added.  (This is de rigueur in California.)  The idea of taking a course because it sounds interesting or challenging seems almost quaint now.  Some of the brighter students will even shy away from art and music classes for fear of lowering their GPA by getting an “A” in a regular course that’s “worth” only 4 points and thus pulling down their 4.0+ average.

Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachersreleased this year, more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”

So yeah, saying it’s a mucked up system is an understatement.  The NYT steps up with nice series of short pieces from five different folks from the world of education and one shill from the College Board (birth mother of the AP program).  Most of them will leave you with a clear sense of how the AP program has deviated greatly from its original intent to give exceptional students a challenge within high school.  But since I’m trying to keep my focus on college admissions, the one piece I’ll direct you to specifically is by a Berkley researcher, Saul Geiser, who discusses the role of AP within the admissions process.  Says Mr. Geiser:

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