High school students seeking to earn as many Advanced Placement credits as possible before heading to the colleges of their choice will soon have fewer opportunities to do so; the College Board recently announced it will discontinue administering the Advanced Placement Latin Literature, French Literature, Computer Science and Italian exams to high school students starting in the 2008-09 academic year?.
The decision developed after the College Board evaluated how best to support AP programs financially.
"We must allocate resources appropriately so that AP teachers and students are supported in the most meaningful, effective and wide-reaching ways," Jennifer Topiel, College Board executive director of communications, wrote in an e-mail. "To do this, we cannot continue to offer two separate courses and exams in several subjects."
Topiel said the decision was made by the Executive Committee of the College Board's Board of Trustees, in hopes that by no longer providing AP exams, the College Board can financially support these four subjects in ways the Board feels are more beneficial.
"A decision of this scope, which requires the balancing of academic, operational, policy and fiduciary interests, needed to be brought directly to the Executive Committee of the College Board's Board of Trustees, which is evenly balanced across these four areas and between secondary and higher education," Topiel said.
University Classics Department Chair John Miller, however, said the AP Latin Literature exam, which is among the cancelled exams, has played a significant role in the expansion of Latin education in high schools.
"The Latin Literature exam was quite influential in the growth of high school Latin over the past few decades," Miller said. "It added flexibility to the curriculum and added variety ... It broadened the range of what was studied in high school."
Miller said that the AP Latin Literature exam has helped to prepare students coming into colleges and universities, and that getting rid of it will restrict this preparation.
"Virginia has one of the three healthiest high school Latin programs in the country ... that's why we have so many students studying Latin at U.Va.," Miller said.
Despite the decision, the College Board staff has "great personal affection for the four AP exams that are being discontinued, primarily through [its] associations with the tremendous AP teachers of those disciplines," Topiel stated.
Both Miller and Topiel also noted that both teachers and the Board will have to keep a close watch on the decision's impact on secondary and higher education.
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