Courtney Carpinello ’15: Episcopal has instituted a new policy in which Advanced Placement (AP) math classes no longer drop once per twelve-day rotation. Students will instead meet every day during the school week. However, the policy is unnecessary in that it diminishes the flexibility in an already rigid schedule.
Head of Upper School Geoffrey Wagg emphasized the necessity of the change, stating, “The College board gives us a recommended amount of hours that we need to teach to assure that students will be well prepared for the AP exams. With drop blocks, we just couldn’t meet those hours.”
There has been no great uproar over this schedule change. AP Calculus student, Peter Cusack ’13 even admitted, “I understand why they would do this because there is a lot of material we need to cover to do well on the AP exam.”
But while the school established this new policy to help students earn higher AP test scores, students’ schedules are often so overwhelming that single free periods are crucial for workload management. Sports practices also intensify student schedules, as critical hours are lost to other extracurricular activities and commitments.
Calculus teacher, Thomas Goebeler, teaches AP Calculus BC and argued, “We had been rushed in previous years. I think I can show anyone the amount of material we need to cover and convince them that we don’t have time to drop.”
One may argue that students involved in AP math courses are able to handle learning much more material in a given year than in a normal math class. However, students in AP math courses are often taking other difficult classes that still drop. Students enrolled in AP courses are able to learn more information on their own at faster rates, which is why they are primarily placed in such classes. Taking away free time from their already hectic schedules only inhibits their ability to be efficient.
Episcopal Academy’s mission statement is to “challenge and nurture mind, body, and spirit.” Yet, the fact that students will lose critical free periods because of the new policy certainly seems to contradict this statement. The new policy on AP math courses upsets this balance of challenging and nurturing as students find themselves overly challenged rather than nurtured. While challenges often elicit the best from students, a balance must be maintained between the two extremes.
Furthermore, AP math courses have been taught for at least a decade and the scores have been remarkably high. According to the AP Report to the Nation, the average score in the US was 2.74 for AP Calculus AB, 3.74 for AP Calculus BC, and 2.76 for AP Statistics, with 5 being the highest score a student could score. EA placed much better in relation to the national average last year with average scores of 4.667, 4.125, and 3.778 respectively.
In AP Calculus AB, there were six students who scored 5s and three who scored 4s. Seven students scored 5s in AP Calculus BC and five scored 4s. The high scores attest to the efficacy of the classes last year, when students dropped once per 12-day rotation. Furthermore, the fact that students in the past year have scored generally high shows that dropping is not necessarily harmful to the curriculum.

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