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For years, Lade said, she has been trying to find out why she and her fellow classmates never received the credit their high school AP teachers said they could expect from colleges.

Lade said she doesn’t understand why one of her tests, but not others, were accepted for credit by the university.

“There’s no consistency,” said Lade. “I have no idea, and I’ve never received responses about my inquiries regarding that. Coming from the same school, with the same classes, from the same teachers, taking the same test, in the same year, we get different credit. That’s just downright messed up.”

In a letter made official by the student congress and sent to administrators late last fall, Lade called on university leaders to “start a dialogue” about the issue of AP credit transfers and apparent inconsistencies. She said she feels the issue has been ignored or put on the back burner for a long time.

“I’ve written letters to the administration at many times in the past regarding my personal experience with Advanced Placement credit at Hamline, and to no avail,” Lade said. “I never received any response or the credit I thought I deserved. So I decided to take action.”

With little luck getting information from university officials, Lade relied on a 2001 Advanced Placement policy manual put out by the state of Minnesota to support her findings regarding AP transfer credit policies.

Although the policy manual is now out of date, it appears to have provided an accurate picture of Hamline’s AP acceptance at the time, given the discovery of anecdotal yet recurrent accounts of AP transfer inconsistencies for the class of 2005.

The old policy manual showed Hamline as accepting few courses for credit and course equivalencies while schools such as Macalester, St. Thomas, and Augsburg displayed complete transfer rubrics for nearly all AP tests. (In the next article, the question of Hamline’s competitiveness in relation to its AP transfer policies will be explored in greater depth.)

Currently, Hamline does have a complete AP rubric available online, and according to Director of
Admissions Steve Bjork, Hamline accepts all adequate AP scores (generally a four or five) for credit.

Every two years, Bjork said, the various departments of the college review information provided by the college board detailing AP course requirements and test rubrics.

“Departments will review those and, based on what content is covered, either mesh it with a course that’s offered here or not,” he said.

Bjork said that while all AP test results (above a certain score determined by the various departments) will net Hamline credit, not all will transfer into course equivalencies or fulfill Hamline Plan requirements.

Some departments, such as Art and Art History, grant no course equivalencies for AP scores. Other departments, like Political Science, will grant credit for some AP tests and not others.

According to Assistant Dean Alzada Tipton, the reasons for granting or denying credit for an AP test vary, but often hinge on the differences between the high school environment and the college classroom.
Among these differences, Tipton cites:
• Different contact hours between students and instructors
• Varying expectations on student work in and out of class
• The different levels of certification of high school and college instructors
• Colleges are supervised by authorities other than public or private secondary schools
• College instructors have doctoral degrees in their subject areas, whereas high school teachers generally do not.

According to both Bjork and Tipton, rather than primarily being a way to earn college credit in high school, they see AP test scores as another indicator of a good student, like a good ACT or SAT scores, or involvement in extracurricular activities.

Bjork said that college should be a complete four-year experience and that giving credit for AP courses complicates matters when students try to graduate early or skip over introductory courses that he says are often vital in introducing students to various disciplines.

“These are high school classes taught in high schools with high school students and high school teachers,” he said. “We think that as a school, it’s fair to accept some of the credit, but just because you get all A’s in high school, should you waive out of your first year of college?”

Tipton questions whether performance on AP tests necessarily correlates with a firm grasp of the material and the methods of the discipline.

“[The College Board] sells training and exams that they score to measure the content that students absorb, theoretically, in a class,” she said. “It’s a class taught to the test standards, essentially.”

Bjork compared AP tests to federal No Child Left Behind requirements, which have caused more and more courses in public schools to be “taught to the test.”

Lade takes offense when administrators and professors question the legitimacy of the College Board tests and their demonstration of student knowledge in a given area of coursework.

“It’s fair that professors want all students to start at the same level with the same background in survey courses,” Lade said. “But I ask them, then, what was the point in me taking Advanced Placement in high school and working this hard for nothing?”

“I had an exceptional experience in Advanced Placement in my high school,” she said. “It was extremely rigorous. I think I feel overprepared almost, coming to Hamline in the background I had in learning writing abilities, writing skills, study skills.”

The rigorousness Lade experienced in high school may be due in part to high expectations from her teachers and one in particular č her father. Stuart Lade, who himself attended Hamline, is the Advanced
Placement coordinator at Brainerd High School and teaches U.S. History and Art History.

In addition to teaching, the elder Lade also conducts workshops in the summer for other AP teachers, corrects AP exams annually in Texas, and is on the Minnesota Board of Education.

Stuart Lade will speak in the next AP article on how Hamline could take better advantage of the AP acceptance program to improve its rankings in publications such as U.S. News and World Report, and provide unique educational opportunities for current and future students.

Erika Lade hopes that the college will pursue a policy that will benefit both students and the university as a whole.

“I think it can achieve two things, ideally. Being able to transfer these credits into actual coursework would allow students to major in multiple disciplines more often at Hamline as well as save money by being able to graduate a semester or two early,” Lade said.