OPENING ADVANCED CLASSES TO EVERYBODY.

OPENING ADVANCED CLASSES TO EVERYBODY. Sam Dillon writes in particular about a school in Worcester, Massachusetts, which also opens up the opportunity to take AP courses to all comers. I have also favored this and never thought it would happen. One of the lessons of MONEYBALL is the importance of choosing the right statistic to measure results. In this case, I think (and have thought) that the success of an AP program should be measured by the percentage of the total students in the school passing an AP test rather than the percentage of a relatively small number of selected students who are allowed to take an AP course. In the high school in Worcester, apparently more than 8 times as many students are taking AP statistics as there were before the program, and scores worthy of college credit have gone from 50% of the students to 70% of the students.