Advanced Courses

We’re making the change because we know we can provide a better, more engaging, and more rigorous program for our students. There has been a significant shift over the past 15 years into best practices in teaching and learning based on advances and changes in such disparate areas as brain science, the impact of the Internet and other technologies on access to information and classrooms, and skills called upon by colleges and employers. Educators have been immersed in these discussions for years, and for independent schools the Harvard School of Education’s publication Turning the Tide in 2016 and the formation of the Mastery Transcription Consortium escalated the conversation about how schools could make learning more meaningful and better prepare students for their future in light of great societal change. The many changes toward more individualized programs and assessments, inside and outside of education, over the past several years make this the right time for us.

Yes, in fact more so as they are designed to promote deeper, more meaningful learning focused on application and synthesis of knowledge rather than memorization. Over the years many APs have become synonymous with rigor. However, the “rigor” associated with APs often relates to speed and volume rather than true academic challenge and depth.  

Our academic leadership team and department chairs created a set of principles to guide the development of all new Advanced Courses, and each department has worked to define what academic excellence looks like in their discipline. Each new course is reviewed by the academic leadership team, as well as a panel of faculty members (the Curriculum & Academic Standards Committee) to ensure these standards are met. In addition, all courses will be approved as honors courses by the University of California. The principles guiding Westridge advanced courses are:

• A clear articulation of conceptual complexity that distinguishes course expectations for learning from regular coursework, in areas such as:   
  • critical thinking 
  • communication
  • creative thinking and expression
  • collaboration
  • self-directed learning 
  • problem-solving  
• Built-in opportunities for interdisciplinary work and demonstration of skills and concepts from other disciplines
• Real-world relevance or college-level content, as appropriate 
• The curation of independent, self-directed inquiry, and learning opportunities that are meaningful and relevant to student interests 
• The curation of long-term thinking and reflection in portfolios 
• Public exhibitions of understanding and learning 
• Opportunities for students to act as practitioners in the field  

We will administer AP exams when our related Advanced Course provides relevant preparation. When Westridge does not administer an exam, students may sit for it at another location.  

In many cases our new Advanced Courses will prepare students for AP exams. We won’t, however, be building our courses with AP exams as an end. We will be building the very best courses possible that challenge students to think in new ways rather than to prepare students for a single exam.  And while we will not offer formal test preparation after AP courses are phased out, our teachers will be able to help students understand the best approaches to test preparation. It is noteworthy that most of the schools that have traversed this path before us report that student interest in taking AP exams diminished significantly once the new program was in place.   

We will administer exams for all AP courses offered over the three-year period of transition to Advanced Courses.  

We have been in touch with admission officers at top colleges and universities across the country including UCs, other major public universities, and small liberal arts colleges and all support this move to Westridge-designed advanced courses. Their interest lies in understanding our curriculum and its demands so they can best assess student achievement and how students challenge themselves within the offerings of our program, rather than the AP designation.   

We have also spoken with many independent schools that have already instituted this change, and unilaterally they report that students were not hurt by the move but were often helped because they were able to better demonstrate deep engagement with the areas of study they were passionate about. Additionally, they report students making better, more authentic, and more balanced course choices about their curricular path through high school. 

We have asked this specific question of college admission officers and have been assured this is not the case. They are accustomed to receiving a diverse set of transcripts and student profiles and that hasn’t changed with the changing status of standardized tests. One representative pointed to the fact that they are remaining test optional as evidence that context is key for assessing applications, especially because tests are not uniformly available.  

No, we spoke with Director of UCLA Undergraduate Admission Gary Clark who said, “More and more schools are moving away from the AP curriculum and applicants from those schools are not disadvantaged in any way. We review applicants in the context of their school and the context of the curriculum available at their school."   

The UCs have their own system under which courses deemed UC honors-level courses are weighted and we are confident our Advanced Courses will receive UC honors designation. All eligible Westridge honors courses have UC Honors designations, and our Advanced Courses will be more rigorous offerings than those. (UC honors-level courses are: Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate Higher Level (IB HL) and designated Standard Level (IB SL) courses, UC-transferable college courses and UC-certified honors courses that appear on a school's course list.  (Click here to read about this on the University of California website.)

Independent schools started moving away from APs decades ago and we know of more than 50 top independent schools that have including such institutions as Chapin, Sidwell Friends, Andover, Nightingale-Bamford, and Georgetown Day. In California the list includes Castilleja, Campbell Hall, Cate, Crossroads, Thacher, Crystal Springs Uplands, and the Webb Schools. In Pasadena, Polytechnic has begun work in this area and has introduced three classes intended to stretch beyond APs in their level of rigor, creativity, and student guided inquiry. Also, as part of our research on this topic, we joined a consortium of more than a dozen Los Angeles area high schools who are investigating new approaches to advanced studies.  

We believe that weighted grades incentivize students to take courses for weight instead of based on what they are passionate about, which runs contrary to the principles of deep learning, adds to student stress, and works against students developing authentic interests and passions. And as we have learned from colleges, as well as other schools that do not weight grades, weighted grades do not provide an advantage to students. 

No. All colleges we have spoken with tell us they view student applications holistically and within the context of their school. In fact, a significant percentage of colleges remove school weights so they can reweight all student grades according to their own system in order to more fairly assess students applying from thousands of different high school programs.   

A story on this topic from Inside Higher Education quoted an email from David Hawkins, executive director for educational content and policy at National Association for College Admissions Counseling, saying that when the association has studied the issue of weighted grades, it has found no advantage for students at high schools that weight. The same article reports of a survey of more than 100 highly competitive colleges conducted by Wayland High School in Massachusetts that found “all said that it would make no difference, and many said that they already remove the weighting before even considering an applicant's grades.” High schools we have spoken with that do not weight grades on their transcripts also report no disadvantage.

Our team has been speaking with college admission representatives about the potential for this shift for several years, and now that we know the shape of our advanced offerings, they will begin the formal education process. This will include one-on-one conversations with all of the schools we have relationships with and to which our students are applying each year, information included in the school’s profile sent annually to all schools (this provides context on our school and student opportunities within our program), and other forms of written communication and program documentation. In addition, the Advanced Course designation will be reflected on student transcripts.   

AP exam scores, not the classes themselves, determine if students receive college credit, although fewer colleges are offering this option each year. Instead, most schools offer placement exams in a number of subjects that allow students to test into appropriate level courses.

This has been true in the past but is evolving for many schools. For instance, Trinity College Dublin says it requires the SAT or ACT but not APs (they will take them into consideration). And the University of Edinburgh recently posted changes to its U.S. qualification and testing policy stating  that students without access to APs may have their applications considered based on alternate evidence in many of its colleges.   

There will be some international schools, notably Oxford and Cambridge, for which applicants will still need to take AP exams. We will work with students through our academic guidance programs to ensure they understand the requirements and how they will be able to meet them.   

It is true that there are many scholarships that rely primarily or heavily on GPAs for which weighting is a benefit, but there are literally thousands of others that don’t. If a student does wish to pursue a scholarship where unweighted grades would put them at a deficit, we will work with them to provide needed documentation of the weighted equivalent.

All advanced courses will be designated as such on student transcripts, and students will mark them as advanced courses in the Common App.  

We are stepping beyond APs to encourage students to find purpose in and connections to their learning, but we believe it will also have the welcome outcome of decreasing stress.  

According to Dr. Bill Damon, director of Stanford’s Center on Adolescence, a sense of meaninglessness is a more significant problem than stress itself. Finding connection, meaning, and purpose in work done at school will help offset anxiety caused by heavy volumes of more rote work and having AP exams as extrinsic motivators to learning.

Deeper learning is the philosophical underpinning for designing advanced coursework. In the Lower and Middle schools, deeper learning requires teachers to develop a mindset in our students that encourages higher order thinking skills that are essential to critical thinking, creativity and problem solving to a greater extent than what we currently have.  We want our students to be empowered by what they learn to think for themselves, to be willing to challenge assumptions, and to solve problems for themselves and for the world. Designing lessons using deeper learning as a framework makes learning more meaningful, more purposeful, and less about the grade. It is the application of knowledge that teaches students how to think, how to learn and how to critique ideas and commonly held assumptions.