Starting this year, the freshman Modern World History class will no longer be split into College Preparatory (CP) and Advanced Standing (AS) levels. During late spring, freshman history teachers Cristina Trujillo and Jim Smith proposed this idea to Principal Patricia Kurtz.
Each year, eighth grade history teachers fill out recommendation cards that suggest placement in AS or CP history for each student. Students then work with counselors and academic advisers to program themselves into the recommended class.
“There are some kids who show up in some of our classes and it seems like they might be better suited for the other level of class,” says Trujillo. “One of the things that we have always said is that it would be nice if we could, at our school site, make that evaluation.
This change is intended to help students get onto the correct track. Trujillo and Smith estimate that in past years, as many as 15 percent of students did not seem to be in the history class best suited for them.
Smith points out that a student’s placement in freshman year would tend to endure for the rest of high school, saying, “What we found when we looked at the data is that once they started in freshman year, it didn’t change that much … The AS kids stayed the AS kids and the CP kids stayed the CP kids and what we wanted was to have a clean slate.”
According to Smith, students will be better able to make a decision about which level of history to take for sophomore year after experiencing a year of high school history. “Come freshman year, you do what you want to do, and you do the best you can, and from that you make the decision,” he says.
There will be few changes to the curriculum as both AS and CP were taught following the same standards. The textbook will be a ninth grade level textbook instead of the college level textbook used in Modern World History 1 AS.
For only this year, the course will be called Modern World History 1 AS, even though the classes are a mix of what would have been CP and AS students. In the coming years, it will simply be called Modern World History 1. The class will be designated as AS this year so that students who were expecting an AS class on their transcript get the class they were promised, if that distinction is important to them.
