In the United States, the educational culture wars have taken yet another turn. After several years of increasingly ‘test-optional’ admissions policies, several schools, including Yale, have moved back towards requiring standardized tests. This has set off yet another round of worrying about college admissions for many parents & students. That’s because, even though the economic research is mixed, a tremendous number of families see a ‘good college’ degree as the ticket to a prosperous lifestyle.

That’s particularly true here in Taiwan, where more than 80% of young people go on to postsecondary education, either in Taiwan or abroad. For the past 5 years, Taiwan has had one of the highest flows of university students to the United States of any country in the world. Notably, this trend has been consistent even as Taiwan’s population of college-age enrollees has declined over the past decade.

This means that the debates about higher education in the United States reverberate in Taiwan as well. Many parents & students in Taiwan pay attention to what gets sold to them as the best way to get into a reputable American university, as much as if not more than how to get into a strong Taiwanese university.

Out of this desire to get into a good college, a few ideas have been popularized, and a few companies have made a killing. The College Board, a nonprofit American organization that runs tests, including the SAT, has done particularly well. Its largest program is a series of courses, called Advanced Placement courses, that purport to give students the real experience of a college class while still in high school. At the end of the course, students can even take an exam that, if they pass, will allow them to receive college credit for the course at many universities in the US and abroad–including in Taiwan. The College Board’s total revenue from AP courses was $500US million in 2022. Amid this growth, the US has engaged in a sometimes-fierce debate about the role of these courses in American public education.

Into this debate comes a new book by the education scholar Dr. Annie Abrams. Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) lays out its thesis in its title.

However, the book is more a thoughtful meditation than an invective-filled bromide. Abrams traces the genesis of the AP program back through its history, following a handful of educators at the secondary and postsecondary levels who wanted to provide students at their (mostly white, mostly male, mostly private, and mostly from New England) schools with a stronger grounding in the liberal arts during their transitional period between high school and college.

The AP program started with a relatively small group of initial founders and designers who prioritized a freewheeling, rigorous, liberal-arts style inquiry classroom. From there, however, the AP program became increasingly standardized, turning into what Abrams refers to as a “copy paste classroom.” The current AP program, according to Abrams, “redefines good teaching and good learning in terms of compliance” to a one-size-fits-all approach.

The particular focus on AP exams, and the awarding of college credit for passing scores, reduces the ‘point’ of the course to performing a particular kind of rote knowledge. This, in Abrams’s view, misunderstands the basic educational idea that “direct, quantifiable outcomes do not [fully] measure the value of engaging with students’ thoughts.” In other words: the AP program offers a pale imitation of the real education provided by a college course.

The result, Abrams writes, is that the AP program “is exploiting [parents’ and students’]insecurities for profit.”

Shortchanged is a serious book, and has entered an already-fierce debate about the place of AP courses in the United States. But there are real tensions between the critiques offered in Abrams’s book and the particular concerns of parents and students here in Taiwan.

In short: the reasons that parents & students in Taiwan want to take AP courses aren’t the same as the reasons students in the US want to take them. That means students & parents in Taiwan need to look at the value proposition of AP courses quite differently from those in the United States.

Where Abrams sees the standardization of the AP program as a major limiting factor for its usefulness in the United States, that very standardization can be an advantage to international students. For students who want to study in the United States, having a high school diploma that isn’t from the US can often be a significant hurdle to clear.

Many college admissions offices might not have the expertise to carefully examine a foreign applicant’s record–which has led to some colleges getting themselves in hot water in the past. This can lead to a situation where a foreign student’s education is largely illegible–that is, a college won’t be able to tell what kind of student they’re actually admitting. 

Part of this is inevitable. A great deal of education is contextual & local–what a history education in Taiwan looks like won’t, and really shouldn’t ever be, directly comparable to what it looks like in the US (or Japan, or India, or Kenya, etc).

But due to its standardization, AP courses offer foreign students legibility when it comes to the US college application process. Students know, and they know that colleges know, that a 4 or a 5 on an AP exam administered in Taipei has the same weight as an AP exam administered in Toledo, Ohio.

Abrams spends a significant chunk of Shortchanged criticizing the basically exclusionary model that the AP program was built on. The issue, basically, is that AP courses don’t really offer a real liberal arts education to everyone.

Though it’s beyond the scope of her book, it’s important to remember that the kind of liberal arts approach taken by the founders of the AP program, and to which lip service is still paid, is itself a pretty contextually-specific and historically-contingent development. While it’s true that historically this model has spread along with European colonization & imperial projects, many people around the world find the humanistic focus of the liberal arts valuable and worth pursuing. (Perhaps that’s why it’s mostly international schools in Taiwan that offer AP courses).

Likewise, while an AP course might not be a significant change in approach of classroom style from an American high school classroom, the same isn’t true for a student coming from a Taiwanese-style school. Especially in Taiwan’s highly competitive junior & senior high schools, there’s a distinct shift that happens for a student who wants to take a portfolio-based class like AP Art & Design or performance tasks like the AP Computer Science Principles assessment. Not all students, in Taiwan especially, thrive under the high-pressure environment of all-determinative exams, so even a shift to course-based exams can lower the pressure that some students might feel. For students who want to study in the US, AP courses can be an important early exposure to the style of teaching and learning they can expect in an American college.

What Abrams criticizes as the standardization of AP courses is certainly a real trend. It might be useful, though, to view this standardization as a process of deracination– that is, of creating a common baseline through shearing away specific contexts and biases. This deracination can, in the hands of a skillful teacher, create the kind of baseline that’s particularly valuable to students in Taiwan, especially for those students who want their secondary school experiences to be legible to US colleges & universities.

A study by Jen Kretchmar and Steve Farmer found that students who take between 1 and 5 AP courses in high school tend to perform better in their first year of university than students who didn’t take any of these courses. This means that there’s a predictive power, for university admissions offices, in seeing a moderate number of AP courses on a student’s high school transcript. It’s reasonable, in other words, to give those students who have taken an AP course or two a slight advantage over those who haven’t taken any (keeping in mind that these courses aren’t available to everyone). While it’s important to note the limitations here–students shouldn’t overwhelm themselves, and the effect on students’ university performance disappears after 5 courses–it’s clear that there’s still some positive impact from even a deracinated AP course.

It’s true that, measured against the benchmark of an American liberal arts college, students in an AP course are getting Shortchanged. It’s also true that, for Taiwanese students aiming to study in the United States, it’s still a bargain. 

(This piece reflects the author's opinion, and does not represent the opinion of CommonWealth Magazine.)

About the author:

Tristan Reynolds is an educator and writer based in Taipei. He has worked with a variety of organizations in the US & Taiwan to improve teacher effectiveness, student achievement, and educational equity. He holds an M.S.Ed. from Johns Hopkins University, and is a 2021 Teach For America alumni.