When Aragon students open the course catalog to choose their next math course in the future, a new course may be on the list: AP Precalculus. The College Board is set to offer Precalculus as an AP course in the 2023-24 school year, which may be a decision primarily focused on making profit.
Initially, many arguments stand out in favor of incorporating this curriculum into high schools, benefiting students, schools and the College Board itself. The College Board’s reasoning is that “Every year, tens of thousands of American students are derailed by a common obstacle: inadequate preparation for college math.” Not being prepared for college-level math courses forces many students to retake the class in college or take remedial math classes, potentially delaying their graduation. A standardized curriculum would solve these issues and equip students with the tools they need to tackle college classes.
However, looking deeper into the issue raises many concerns, including the reduced quality of teaching, limited curriculum and further expansion of the unethical monopoly that the College Board runs.
“[AP Precalculus is a] further expansion of the unethical monopoly that College Board runs”
Traditionally, precalculus has been a capstone math course taken in senior year, preparing students for college-level calculus. The class brings together all the math concepts learned in high school and serves as a bridge to statistics, engineering, data science and other STEM fields in college.
The vast majority of schools have well-developed curricula that they have been teaching and adapting for decades. Forcing teachers to align their curriculum with a set of standards may lower the quality of the class, as teachers would be compelled to radically alter their teaching plans.
At Aragon, the curriculum for precalculus covers a wide range of topics such as trigonometry, vectors and polar coordinates. According to the College Board, AP Precalculus will consist of just four units: Polynomial and Rational Functions, Exponential and Logarithmic Functions, Trigonometric and Polar Functions and Functions Involving Parameters, Vectors and Matrices. Each unit will have fourteen or fifteen subtopics, but the curriculum clearly narrows the freedom for teachers with a heavy focus on functions and graphs.
With many high school students choosing to accelerate in their math placement, the race to calculus will only intensify with the addition of AP Precalculus. Students will be incentivized to take AP Precalculus without considering other math-related STEM classes.
“The race to calculus will only intensify with the addition of AP Precalculus”
Professor and former Mathematical Association of America (MAA) president David Bressoud wrote in a blog post from July 2021, “Preparation for calculus dominates and drives the high school curriculum, even and especially for those students who have no desire to ever study it. There is so much more to mathematics.”
Also, many students sacrifice building a solid math foundation in order to get to calculus as soon as possible, which the University of California’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) has warned against. “BOARS also strongly urges students not to race to calculus at the cost of full mastery of the earlier math curriculum,” said BOARS in a statement made in April 2016.
Finally, perhaps the most important factor in adding a new AP course is the elephant in the room whenever the College Board is discussed: the cost. Each exam costs around one hundred dollars if ordered on time, an insane amount of money especially considering that College Board is a not-for-profit organization that aims to provide educational opportunities for all students. If the exam is too expensive, students simply can’t afford it, no matter how much they want to prepare themselves for college.
With the SAT subject tests recently being removed and many colleges choosing to not look at SAT scores, the College Board may be looking for more ways to generate revenue. An easy way to do that is to add an AP course, allowing the organization to rake in millions of dollars and contributing to the total revenue of over one billion dollars. In 2021, the College Board made $278 million dollars in profit and administered over 4.5 million AP tests. Schools should not give in to the College Board’s scheme.
The addition of AP Precalculus by the College Board is an attempted expansion of its monopoly on education, taking freedom away from teachers and negatively impacting students] in the name of preparing all students better for college. The few benefits that a standardized curriculum would bring is far outweighed by all the consequences of implementing AP Precalculus.
