It's hard not to be impressed with a student who earned the only perfect score in the world on the AP Calculus test:
An Indiana high school student received a perfect score on the Advanced Placement Calculus AB exam this spring, the only student in the world to achieve such a feat.
Felix Zhang, currently a junior at Penn High School in Mishawaka, Indiana, aced the test with 108 points out of the 108 points possible.
Impressive.
On the other hand, if only 1 person in the world can achieve this, what does that say about the reasonableness of the College Board's standards? Did more students used to achieve this, but now no longer do for some reason? Enquiring minds want to know.
6 comments:
Kid's pretty smart, huh.
I don't know, what does it say? I mean, the test was to be a test of excellence at the college level by a student in high school. Therefore I would expect few perfect scores. I would be more concerned if there were a lot of perfect scores. A better question I would like to know the answer to is those who took the AP (any subject) and got college credit, how did they do in follow on classes that required that as a prerequisite?
If those that passed the AP did well, then the reasonableness of the test is held up. If they did poorly, the test is not a reasonable measurement of mastery.
This means it's a well-designed test. If students are getting a perfect score, you're failing to capture the entire curve.
I agree that perfect scores should be a small subset of "5" scores. But only one on the entire planet? I'd say that's a bit extreme.
I think the fact that this was the AB exam may matter here. There are two calculus exams: AB and BC. The BC exam is "more advanced" and contains more material from traditional second-semester college calculus. At many colleges/universities, a score of 3 on the BC exam gets a student the same college credits (or more) as a 5 on the AB exam. So there may be some self-selection here- the kids most likely to get a perfect AB score are more likely to take the BC exam.
I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, but it may partly explain why there are so few perfect scores. I couldn't access the link (I got an "Access Denied" message), so I don't know if anything was said about the BC exam.
Steve, I can answer your question about 1 student who did well on her AP exam and then took upper level course in the same subject. I did it in AP Latin on Virgil's Aeneid. I got a 4, and so to satisfy my language requirement I just needed one Latin course. I did well, but what was bad is that I was the only freshman in an 8 person class. It was right after breakfast, and even though I ate, my innards tended to rumble. One time, the teacher actually asked if I ate breakfast.
About the only thing that I remember from the course is a bad Latin pun and that slapstick comedy is still funny after many ages, but political comedy goes bad and isn't funny any more
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