Word: placement
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...atmosphere. They see colleges becoming mere cram schools for graduate study, and at some prestige campuses, 90% of all B.A.s do go on studying (national rate: 33%). The generalists are also unhappy about speedup advanced-standing schemes in which students skip entire years. (They approve the extra-credit Advanced Placement Program.) At Harvard, Classicist John Finley argues that even ultrabrights need time to grow up. "A student can fly from the West Coast to Harvard in a few hours," says Finley, "but the soul is like a little dog that has to run all the way across the continent...
...Another prediction [in addition to shift in balance from private to public schools sending AP students to Harvard] seems to be working out. The number of advanced placement candidates at Harvard has begun to level off; the rate of increase has slowed down. Last year there were only ten more candidates than the year before--540 against 530--the number of examinations was substantially the same. This stabilization is, in my view, closely related to the nature of our applicant group and our admissions policy, and suggests that we may be reaching an upper limit in the number of advanced...
...same time, within this group, the quality of performance on the examinations, reflected in the number of actual advanced placement awards at Harvard, reveals an increasing competence on the part of the students who have taken college-level work in secondary school. This in turn is reflected in an unabating increase in the number of students eligible for sophomore standing...
...this as starkly as possible. If one conjectures on the growth of advanced placement during the next ten years, it seems probable that an upper limit in the number of entering students who have been afforded the opportunity to attend a school (usually suburban or private) that offers advanced placement work is probably five or six hundred--about half of the class But as this favored group becomes increasingly well trained and as our selection of students within these schools becomes increasingly rigorous the number of advanced placement candidates who become eligible for sophomore standing could approach 100 per cent...
...against a background of slowly emerging criticism of the program--some valid, some clearly spurious--that a discussion of growth or curtailment must be undertaken. I would like to as rapidly as possible with a central criticism, one that strikes at the very concept of advanced placement. Overtly it is expressed when an adviser points to a failing grade in a middle-group course and generalizes about a program that presses innocent children into studies for which they are not prepared; when a tutor reports on a sophomore standing student whose performance on general examinations has fallen short...