Memorandum Justifying the Raising of a Cut-off of 3 to 4

At a meeting of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi English faculty on August 25, 2000, it was unanimously decided to raise the Advanced Placement score that qualifies a student for advanced credit for English 1301 from the current score of three to four.

There are several reasons for our decision. Perhaps the most compelling is that recently we have redesigned our English 1302 (the second half of first-year required composition sequence). English 1302 is the required course that AP advanced credit places a student into here at TAMU-CC. Intellectually, it is now a more demanding course. As prerequisite, it expects students already to be skilled in writing lengthy essays that are complexly reasoned and organized and that integrate a variety of outside sources. These are not skills required for a score of 3 on the AP English examination. In short, students who earn a score of 3 are at risk in English 1302 as it is now taught at TAMU-CC.

What level of writing skill does a score of 3 on the AP represent? This is difficult to tell. It is difficult in large part because of the dubious validity of the exam. What does a 30 minute essay on a literary work say about a student’s writing abilities or potential? One informative piece of data: 53 percent of Texas students who took the AP examination in the 1998–1999 school year scored 3 or better.

In a comprehensive study of AP practices, William Lichten of Yale University documents that the more selective the university in terms of admissions, the more likely that it requires a score of 4 or higher for advance credit. According to Lichten, around the nation, only 45 percent of colleges and universities currently allow credit for a score of 3 or lower, and that percentage is falling. (“Whither Advanced Placement? Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 8.29, June, 2000).

In terms of AP credit, our English faculty would like to imagine TAMU-CC in the upper majority of institutions of higher learning rather than in the lower minority. We imagine that other of the Texas A&M universities imagine the same of their institution.

It’s important to note that raising the qualifying score to 4 would still mean that around 30 percent of AP test-takers in Texas would earn advanced credit in English. In other words, changing the qualifying score from 3 to 4 will affect little more than 15 percent of students bringing AP scores to TAMU-CC.

It might be noted that universities that administer their own placement examinations in writing (examinations usually much more valid than the AP test) typically give advanced credit for their first-year writing course to only around 3–5% of entering freshmen. A study at Quinnipiac College, where AP students have to undergo the college’s own placement examinations, found that only 5% of students who had earned advanced credit in composition courses through AP or dual-credit coursework would have qualified for that credit through the college’s placement essay, and that 15% of them would have been placed in remedial sections of first-year writing.