Parents hear it from the media and guidance counselors all the time: make sure your student takes rigorous courses in high school. And perhaps you’ve struggled with the obvious question: how rigorous should a high school curriculum be?
What is Rigor?
Allison Wignall said it simply: “…rigor is the academic or intellectual challenge of a class.” This matters. For one, college is challenging, and shouldn’t students prepare themselves for that challenge by taking challenging courses in high school? In a word, yes, but there are limits to how much rigor really works for students and how much it benefits them.
Rigor also matters because of what some say is the low knowledge level of today’s high school students. Natalie Wexler pointed to the fact that while grades are going up, science and math scores through the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) are either flat or going down. (This is only one assessment of learning—not the only one). This is one reason rigor is pitched so early to high school students and their parents.
The High School Curriculum
Completing high school is a rite of passage for students. We tell them all the time that their opportunities will be limited if they don’t have a high school diploma. We also tell them—for good reason—that having a college degree will open even more doors for them. Most students, though, won’t know how to get into college, what courses to take, how to choose a college, or how to explore majors and careers. That’s where parents and guidance counselors come in.
Parents remember high school, but they aren’t experts on high school curricula. So when they ask guidance counselors for information to help their students, they’re likely to hear about making sure their students take the right courses in high school. Because guidance counselors spread the mantra of taking advanced placement course and making sure students challenge themselves. These courses sounds tough to most parents, which begs the question again: how rigorous should a high school curriculum be?
What Courses to Take
In my school district, there are four levels of high school courses: standard, certificate of merit, honors, and advanced placement (AP). These are listed from less rigorous to most rigorous. Guidance counselors tell parents up front that if their student wants to go to college, they need to take the certificate of merit courses, and move onto honors and advanced placement as soon possible. What the counselors know is that the more rigorous the high school courses a student takes, the more favorably colleges will look upon that student.
Advanced placement courses are essentially college-level courses offered in the high school. Many districts offer additional weight for advanced placement grades, which is one reason students take them. As the advanced placement course ends, students can take a final exam with final scores ranging from 1 through 5. Colleges may offer credit for advanced placement courses for scores of 3 through 5 depending on the university. This means students who pass the courses have already earned college credit while in high school. Score!
The Flip Side on Advanced Placement
But there is a dark side to advanced placement. For one thing, many of the students who take advanced placement courses don’t earn college credit at all. In fact, some don’t take the test at all. Remember how students may receive extra weight on their grades by taking AP courses? Well sometimes, the difficulty of those courses might drop a student’s GPA so much, that extra weight doesn’t really help them, and their grades go down, rather than up. And at some schools, such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, taking more than five advanced placement courses doesn’t help a student’s admission prospects at all.
Advanced Placement versus Dual Enrollment
Another option for taking rigorous courses in high school is participating in dual enrollment. This means that students take college courses while in high school that count for both college credit and high school credit. The community college where I served as vice president offered this option to local high school students, and it gave them an excellent introduction in college courses and college life. The odd thing is that the Washington Post has a so-called “challenge index,” which uses the percentage of high school students taking advanced placement courses as a measure of a high school curriculum’s rigor. However, they don’t count students taking college courses as an indication of rigor. Really?
In my view, dual enrollment is as good as AP, plus students participating in dual enrollment automatically earn credit for the college-level course if they pass the course, not just by passing a single test. Yet some schools and school systems push AP at the expense of dual enrollment. Here’s how I look at it: Advanced Placement is taking a college-level course in a high school setting. Dual enrollment is taking a college course in a college setting. Why is taking the course at a college seen as less rigorous or desirable? In a word, that’s ridiculous, and I don’t mind saying so.
What Can You Do?
Let’s take another look at rigor. Is it just about how tough the courses are or the kind of learning environment your student’s high school has? Matthew Lynch writing in The Advocate said it best: “Real academic rigor, however, occurs when teachers create challenging lessons that help their students meet those high expectations.” So perhaps the question shouldn’t just be “how rigorous should a high school curriculum be?” Rather, we should also ask: how is the rigor helping my student?” When high schools and colleges show they understand this, we’ll see the great benefits rigor can give our students.