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In addition to teaching high school history, Lade is the Advanced Placement program coordinator for Brainerd High School, sits on the state board of education, and spends his summers training other AP teachers and grading AP tests.

If Hamline doesn’t take action to improve its AP policy, Lade says, the university will ultimately suffer.
“Their poor AP acceptance policy will cause students to go other places. They will be counseled by us [high school teachers] to go other places, and this will spread to other high schools,” Lade said. “Advanced Placement is growing by 10 percent each year in the state and nationally, and Hamline is going to be left behind.”

“Clearly lagging behind”

Lade says that while Hamline has made sure to accept PSEO credits, there has been little incentive for the university’s administrators to have a more generous and enticing AP acceptance policy. He says this is because PSEO is an initiative of the state of Minnesota, whereas the College Board and AP are national programs without much sway in state politics.

“[Hamline is] taking PSEO credits directly because it’s a state law, but they are waffling on AP exams because they are not under that kind of pressure,” Lade said.

According to Steve Bjork, Hamline associate vice president for admission, many community colleges in the metropolitan area have credit transfer agreements with Hamline that allow their credits to transfer in seamlessly as equivalent coursework. To receive credit for courses at other institutions that have no existing relationship with Hamline, however, students are asked to provide course syllabi and content descriptions for the course in question in order to demonstrate that it is on par with Hamline courses. As for AP tests, Hamline acceptance policies are reviewed every two years using test rubrics provided by the College Board.

Lade says that unlike in PSEO, accountability is already built into the Advanced Placement system, which should enable Hamline to have a more consistent policy.

Bjork, however, said he thinks many AP courses “teach to the test.” Additionally, Assistant Dean of Students Alzada Tipton said she does not believe that performance on a single test can accurately measure a semester’s or a year’s worth of classroom experience.

Lade rejects these arguments as absurd.

“I would love to be able to teach to the test, but how can you teach to a U.S. history test that goes from the pre-Columbian era to Vietnam? That [attitude] is distressing; they should know better than that,” Lade said.
In Lade’s opinion, Hamline could be doing much more to attract top high school scholars from across the state and the nation. The first step, he says, would be for the university to simply bring its AP acceptance policy into parity with its acceptance of credits earned through Minnesota’s Post-Secondary Education Option (PSEO).

“A three scored on an AP test is certainly equivalent to receiving a C grade at a community college, and at the community college there is no test accountability,” Lade said, challenging the notion, expressed by Bjork in last week’s article, that most high schools cannot offer an educational environment comparable to colleges. “Do we know what the instructor at Austin Community College is doing in his classroom?
Hamline just accepts those credits carte blanche without any questions asked.”

In comparing Hamline’s AP acceptance policies to those of the other ACTC schools, Lade says Hamline is “clearly lagging behind.” He points to the lack of course equivalencies as a detraction for top students considering higher education options.

If these students come to realize that they would get a better deal from another school in terms of course equivalencies and being able to graduate early, he said, then Hamline will be put at a disadvantage vis-a-vis other schools.

Other schools, Lade said, have taken a more proactive approach toward the AP program and have tailored policies that are attractive to top scholars.

“Augsburg and St. Thomas are readily accepting scores of three across the board [on AP tests],” Lade said.

According to Bjork, Hamline is competitive with the other schools of the ACTC in AP acceptance. If a student is particularly concerned with course equivalencies, Bjork points out that some tests that don’t translate into specific coursework still carry a Hamline Plan designation, which will satisfy requirements toward graduation. There are four such tests - English Literature and Composition (H), U.S. History (S), European History (S), and Latin (L).

Also, Hamline awards elective credit for two AP tests (Studio Art and Spanish Literature) that no other ACTC school accepts. Neither of these courses, however, provide a student with a course equivalency or Hamline Plan designation.

Attracting top students

Rather than viewing Advanced Placement as another issue to be dealt with, Lade says, Hamline should be using the program to strategically position itself among its competitors.

He suggests that Hamline create special programs to attract AP scholars. Since many AP students have already completed a semester’s worth of credits when entering Hamline, Lade suggests that they be given a range of educational options that would benefit the student, as well as the university.

For instance, he says, students could graduate from college early and begin law school. Alternatively, students could take a semester off and, for instance, conduct an in-depth research project or receive training to teach English as a second language.

Such initiatives would enable top students to pursue more creative and in-depth academic endeavors
“that would potentially bring esteem to the college,” Lade said. “All of these things add up to how colleges are rated.”

Additionally, Lade said, by attracting more AP scholars and allowing each of them to forgo a number of survey courses, Hamline may be able to ease the problem of overcrowded introductory courses.

“It would get good students to take 3000-level classes, and this would be to everybody’s benefit - the instructor, the student; there would be more bodies in those upper-level courses,” Lade said. “That would make perfect sense to me as someone who has taught school for over 30 years.”

Ultimately, Lade says, the university needs to find a way to transform its AP policy from a liability into a selling point for Hamline.

He said actively recruiting AP students is important for many reasons, and it may help raise the school’s ranking in publications such as U.S. News and World Report.

“What I have always found befuddling is that these colleges don’t go after these kinds of students like they go after athletes,” Lade said. “They are well-prepared, they have high ACT scores, and they have a work attitude where they will contribute mightily to the college environment and the entire scholarly life of the university.”

However, high school students with high AP scores aren’t always looking for schools that will give them the most credit, Bjork said.

“There are less prestigious schools than Hamline that have much more generous transfer policies, and there are very prestigious schools that are much more restrictive,” Bjork said. “A good AP student doesn’t even think about this. It’s part of the package, but bottom line, what we try and have our prospective students think about is what school is the best match for [them].

“You can keep a scorecard of how many AP credits [students are] going to get, and some students do that. But the reality is that students are trying to choose. The best students that take a lot of AP classes, take a lot of AP exams, those are the students that are looking deeper than what the superficial number of credits are .... and what score [the college will] accept.

“If you went through and took the time to analyze every college that accepts AP credit,” Bjork said,
“[Hamline is] right smack dab in the middle, both in the scores we accept for credit and how those exams that are accepted for credit are marked as equivalent or not equivalent to courses in departments.”

Garvin Davenport, CLA dean and vice president for academic affairs, declined to specifically respond to the question of Hamline’s competitiveness with other schools in regards to Advanced Placement policies, stating that he would have nothing to add to comments provided by Bjork and Assisstant Dean Alzada Tipton, both of whom were quoted in last week’s Oracle AP article.

Two prospective students visiting Hamline last week, Morgan Moores and Andrew Chapel, said they had taken or planned on taking courses for which Hamline offered no course equivalencies, but said that wouldn’t affect their decision of where to attend school.

Chapel, a junior at the Breck School in Golden Valley, plans on taking both the U.S. History and European History tests before he graduates, and besides Hamline, he is also considering attending Macalester.
Even though Macalester would grant course equivalencies for each of his AP tests, whereas Hamline would not, Breck said that wouldn’t make much of a difference in his decision-making.

“It’s more just the feel of the school and what is offered overall,” said Chapel.

Moores, a junior at Mounds Park Academy, who said he is thinking of taking the Spanish and Chemistry tests, agreed with Chapel that receiving course equivalencies for his AP tests wouldn’t be a very important factor in deciding where to college.

Program under review

Following Erika Lade’s letter imploring the university administration to engage in a dialogue with the campus regarding the AP acceptance policy (reported on in last week’s Oracle), the college’s Academic
Affairs Committee (AAC) met to consider her accusations that Hamline’s AP policy was unclear and inconsistent and that many tests were not accepted for any credit at all.

According to Assistant Dean Alan Silva, the AAC reviewed the college’s AP policies and found no problems with the program.

“... AAC feels that CLA policies on AP credits are clear and consistent,” he wrote in a letter to Lade on Dec. 16.

However, he added in the letter, isolated errors in application of the policy are always possible. “The sheer volume of transfer credits (literally thousands of credit transfers each year) could lead, on occasion, to an error,” he wrote.

Both Silva and Garvin Davenport, CLA dean and vice president for academic services, declined interviews for this article.

While it is now clear that many of Erika Lade’s original objections to Hamline’s AP policy were based on the inconsistencies experienced by her fellow classmates rather than the policy itself, it is also clear that those inconsistencies may be widespread than previously thought.

As students have come to her office, Registrar Laurie Herbrand has recognized a possible larger problem for the class of ‘05, as well as other classes. While she said she can’t explain why certain students did not receive the credit they were due, she is not proud of the errors and has committed to righting any wrongs on students’ transcripts.

“We want to hear from students who have questions,” Herbrand said. “It’s important to move forward and make the records right.”

As for Hamline’s actual AP acceptance policies, Bjork says this spring the departments will once again review material sent by the College Board to judge which AP tests will be given course equivalencies and which will be assigned as elective credits. Most of the current course equivalencies have been in place since 1998, the earliest year for which the administrative database system Banner has records.

English professor Veena Deo, an AAC member, said that if Hamline is concerned about being competitive in terms of its AP policy, it may require broad college-wide action, rather than action from individual departments.

“The AP program as a whole may be something that Hamline has to address institutionally,” Deo said. In this case, she says, the AAC would have to consider the policy “holistically,” in order to make sure that Hamline is as attractive as possible to top high school scholars.

“It’s clear that if you are a comparison shopper, you can say ‘I’ll get a better deal somewhere else,’” she said. “At that level, the student has to decide if it’s worth going to another school just to get out of one class.”

While Deo says she can’t quite imagine exactly how students who “shop around” for colleges ultimately decide on which to attend, she says that Hamline may not currently be an attractive institution for an AP scholars, who she says make valuable contributions to the campus.

“They are our better students - there’s no question about that,” Deo said of AP, International
Baccalaureate, and other students who clearly challenged themselves in high school.