Give us a little credit

While Penn may destroy historical landmarks and alienate its neighbors, it really only has the best interests of its students at heart. When this institution hurts you, baby, it's only because it loves you.

In so many words, my friends put forth this theory at dinner the other night. The topic of conversation was Penn's ever-tightening policy on Advanced Placement credit. Get this: two of the students had taken the same AP test the same year. They both did well and received the same score. While one received credit for Penn's introductory psychology course, the other, who transferred to Penn this year, received only a waiver for the course to go on to the next level. The general response around the table to the discrepancy was one of understanding. The University has to keep academic integrity at the forefront, and one must keep up with the HarvardPrincetonYales of the world.

Recently, there has been a push in top American universities to phase out Advanced Placement scores for credit. Although the tests and the classes that teach for them were designed to challenge high school students at the collegiate level, elite schools like own our doubt whether AP classes are really at their level.

Apparently, some tests are believed to not properly evaluate students' comprehension of the material. For instance, those who perform well on the AP Calculus AB exam may only be "plugging and chugging" numbers instead of truly following the theory behind the equations. Using this logic, it makes sense that many of Penn's requirements for AP credits have gone from a 4 to a 5 and now to "no credit given." Even with the highest score possible, Penn wasn't sure you really met its educational standards.

Given these concerns, I was sold on the whole "academic integrity" bit until I heard about the course waiver policy. Awarding a student a course waiver sends a mixed message. On one hand, the AP class prepared the student enough to jump right into the higher levels of economics or whatever at Penn. But on the other, it just wasn't intense enough to equal credit for the introductory course itself.

I think the use of the "course waiver" in lieu of course credit reveals what the trend in Penn's Advanced Placement policy is really all about: money. More than anything else, the University doesn't want to just "give away" credits because credits are worth money. Depending on how many courses a full-time undergraduate takes a semester, a credit costs from as "little" as $2,753 to as much as $4,590.

Join me in a little hypothetical exercise. Penn students are largely overachievers, right? And I bet we're pretty good at taking tests as well. So, a lot of Penn students took a lot of AP classes in high school and did very well. Let's pretend that Penn accepted more Advanced Placement tests for course credit, and exactly 15 percent of the class of 2008 received four college credits. Then six semesters from now those 360 students decide to graduate a semester early. Even if tuition doesn't rise from now until the spring of 2008, at $13,772 a semester the University would lose almost $5 million in tuition alone. If the same conditions applied to the graduating classes of 2005, 2006 and 2007, the loss to the University would add up to the tiny sum of about $20 million.

Penn's deception bothers me because I was introduced to the Advanced Placement as a way for students to save money in college. At $80 dollars a test, the AP system can be very affordable, and some state legislatures subsidize the cost of AP tests if students perform well on an aptitude test in the subject.

The cost of tuition and fees for undergraduate students at Penn rose 4.4 percent this year. Odds are, the DP will be reporting this spring that tuition will rise again. Some spokesman for the University will wring his hands, express regret about the unaffordability of education here and say, "Well, we're very sorry, but what can we do? Costs are rising..."

You know, I have an idea.

Penn students have a lot of respect for their school. They're even willing to accept restrictions on AP credit for the sake of academy integrity. But increasing the financial burden on students in this way is undeserved. Perhaps Penn should work on building other kinds of integrity in the future.

Amara Rockar is a sophomore political science major from St. Louis. Out of Range appears on Fridays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.