The Case Against College Prep Courses

When I moved from Mississippi to South Carolina my junior year, I had to adjust to a lot of new changes. Suddenly, I was the one with a country accent, rather than my county-school friends.  Restaurants seemed to prefer Luzianne sweet tea over Lipton sweet tea--and yes, there is a big difference.  And I began attending a huge school with a campus five times bigger than my old school and a student body that is three times as large.

However, "y'all" is still the preferred pronoun and any tea can be made better with a little sugar.  You even learn to master two flights of stairs and a few very long hallways in five minutes between classes.  So the biggest difference would have to be the "College Preparatory" program that my high school relies on.

If you're one of my Mississippians, you have probably never heard of such a thing, but apparently this trend is spreading through states.  I have no idea if it even originated in South Carolina, but colleges are starting to look for it.  My introduction to the CP program went something like this while I was making my schedule at my new school:

Guidance Counselor: Are you a CP student?

Me: What?

Guidance Counselor: Are you a college preparatory student?

Me: I'm preparing for college, yes.

Guidance Counselor: That's not what I mean.  Do you take CP classes?

Me: What is a CP class?

Basically, the school operates on these four types of classes: Advanced Placement, Honors, College Preparatory, and Regular.  AP, of course, is internationally considered to be college-level classes.  Honors is a step down from AP.  Regular, to be blunt, is for the immigrants who can barely speak English and for the illiterate students that teachers only pass to get rid of.  Call this an exaggeration or even defamation, but everyone knows it is true.  If you are a regular student, you aren't going to graduate and you sure aren't going to college.

That leaves CP.

In Mississippi, you were either an AP student or a regular student.  There were "Pre-APs" for underclassmen, but that was only English, Biology, and World History.  They were supposed to be harder, though they often weren't.  There was nothing wrong with being a regular student.  

So, from what I've gathered, this is how the courses compare (and please remember that this only compares one school in each state, not the whole state):

Not that much of a difference, right?

Wrong.

I was an AP English, Pre-AP English student in Mississippi.  My junior year in South Carolina, the huge school that promised tons of resources was terrifying, so when I transferred I decided to stick to only AP English and take all of my other classes as CP.  I thought that they would certainly be difficult, and I didn't want to ruin my junior year.

Well, I was right.  The CP courses were difficult.  CP Physical Science (PS is a required course in SC) was harder than AP English.  Yet I was one of the few students that wasn't a minority, and in that class I was the only student taking an AP class.  I was watching all of these slackers manage to make A's in CP Physical Science, while I made C's and D's.

What was going on?

 To be honest, I thought it was a fluke.  Science has never been my thing.  But next semester, I took CP Algebra II, in which I had a wonderful teacher.  Even though I don't understand some basic arithmetic, I did extremely well in that class.  I thought that it was just CP Physical Science.

Until my senior year came.  I bit the bullet and decided to take a full schedule, with AP Microeconomics, AP Government, and AP English.  Oh, and CP Computer Animation and CP Chemistry.  How am I doing?  I'm making high marks in all of my AP classes.  Yes, I have to study, but I have yet to pull an all-nighter this year, I have a life, and I still manage to be a regular writer and blogger.  I also tutor special-ed students.  But what about CP Computer Animation and CP Chemistry?

Uh...not so great.  Let's just say that by the end of this semester, I'll be lucky if I have B's in those classes.

Like I said earlier, what is going on?

 Most CP courses I've taken (the only exception is Algebra II with its fabulous teacher) have a lot in common:

• The classes are out of control.  Even the seniors and juniors are loud, disrespectful of the teachers, and destructive of classroom materials.  (Example: broken flasks and beakers in Chemistry.)
• The teachers are soft-spoken and cannot handle pressure.  When the class is loud and boisterous, they go and sit behind their desks.
• The class totally relies on SmartBoards, Elmos, videos, and online activities and tests.
• Classroom lectures consist of a couple of notes on the SmartBoard and maybe a demonstration of some chemicals or a video.
• Teachers automatically assume that the students know background information.
• Tests and quizzes are randomly handed out on material we have not covered in class because of the uncontrollable behavior of the students.
• Teachers automatically assume that a worksheet or book assignment for homework can explain the whole unit.
• The one "smart kid" in the class lets one other student copy his/her work, and then the whole class ends up with the same answers. The teacher does nothing about this.
• Teachers are so disorganized they lose grades, tests, and lesson plans.

Compare to the "regular" classes in Mississippi:

•   Students are usually well-behaved.  Sometimes energetic, but class is usually not disrupted.  If they misbehave, the teachers can handle them and quiet the classroom.
• Teachers give students tons of notes, classroom projects, verbal lectures, examples, and lots of practice.  If a student does not understand, the teacher will work until all of the students do understand.
• Lectures last throughout the whole class.
• Teachers know that students should be able to understand background information, yet they teach it anyway.
• Reviews before tests and quizzes are the norm.
• Homework is always checked and the class always goes over the homework.
• Cheating is basically a federal crime in the school.  Even copying homework assignments is not tolerated.
• Teachers are greatly organized and actually get to know their students.

See the difference?  The MS "regular" classes do not spoon-feed you, but rather they teach and check your comprehension.  The SC "CP" classes don't spoon-feed you, either.  Instead, they kind of just fling random information at you when the class volume is at a soft roar.  The CP kids who have dealt with this program for years have learned how to work it: copy the answers, turn in incomplete homework that will never be checked, and you get an A.  I, however, have been in a school that taught me how to absorb information from notes and examples from a talented teacher.  These watered-down five minute lectures do not let me absorb.  Especially in the maths and sciences, I always finish a lecture with one question on my mind: Wait, what?

Maybe spending my ninth and tenth grade years--the most impressionable years of high school--in such a good school spoiled me.  Maybe it programmed me so I can only understand thorough lectures.  Maybe it's not preparing me for a brash college professor at all.

But how in the world am I supposed to learn in a CP environment?

I'm not only blaming the teachers.  I'm blaming the students as well.  Most CP kids are so immature that it's probably impossible for a teacher to get a handle on the situation.  But why are most CP kids of all races, genders, backgrounds, religions, and personalities so ill-behaved?

Frankly, I think most of the blame lies with the school district as a whole.  They do not have high expectations for CP students.  CP students, even though they're anywhere from thirteen to nineteen years old, are not allowed to use a lot of lab equipment.  The school purchased extremely expensive, advanced thermometers and it apparently took one of my teachers a long time to convince administration that CP students could indeed use them without destroying them.  CP students are not told they must behave like Honors students.  To most of the CP students (since most of them are not a mix of CP and AP like I am), the Honors and AP kids are a completely different breed.  They're the "brains"--the kids who are going to "be somebody."  (I really hate that phrase, but that's another conversation entirely.)  CP kids may be "preparing for college" but college isn't even on most of their minds.  They don't even think past what they'll do when the final bell of the day rings.

Shortly after we moved here, I tried to explain my CP Physical Science class to my mom: bare minimum lectures, a teacher who disliked all students and refused to be acquainted with them, and surprise tests on materials we never went over.  Her automatic response was, "Hey, that sounds like college."  So is that what College Preparatory classes are about?  They're preparing us for the cold world called higher education?

Maybe so, but how effective is it in high school?  The answer is: it's not.  It's only teaching students to be lazy and to cheat.  It's only telling us that adults don't care and don't expect us to succeed.  It's not preparing us for the real world at all.

My dad saw that I was struggling in some of my CP classes and immediately asked why.  After I tried to explain all of this to him, I finally only left him with this statement:  "CP's are so easy, they're dumbing me down.  They're so easy they're hard."  It sounds like a huge oxymoron, but I think it properly underlines the CP effect. (Of course, I have had one exception with CP Algebra II, but that class was full of well-behaved children and a teacher who personally tutored the students if they needed help.)

So, to sum it all up, I think I'll leave you, dear reader, with a conversation I had with a fellow CP student.  He is one of the biggest disruptions in the class, yet he manages to keep a B average in the class thanks to copying and cutting corners.

Unnamed Student: Hey Sarah, what do you have in this class?

Me: Uh, I'm not doing so hot.

Unnamed Student: Do you have to pass this class?

Since when does any kid get to choose which class he or she has to pass?  What, are we allowed to have two or three bonus classes that don't really matter if we pass or not? That, dear reader, is the case against College Preparatory courses.  They lower the students' expectations of themselves.

If you think I'm disgruntled now, you should have seen my face when I started to fill out the out-of-state application for the University of Mississippi.  There, in the prerequisites, it listed a number of required courses filed under the name "College Preparatory Courses."  Unfortunately, these low expectations and performances are spreading.