Teachers, Don’t Let an AP Exam Score Define You
There are many things we’re passionate about here at Three Heads: coffee, the superiority of dark chocolate to milk chocolate, our 5C paragraph structure, the power of a well-selected font, that moment when our unit plan clicks into place like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
But after experiencing severe burnout that led us to leave the classroom, we’re also passionate about helping teachers be real about what we can and cannot do.
And one of the most important truths we want all teachers to know is that no high-stakes testing result—whether it’s an AP exam score, a state testing report, a class SAT or ACT average, or a set of data from a school or district assessment—determines your value as a teacher.
The expectations our society places on teachers are completely unreasonable: not only are there so many of them that it is humanly impossible to excel at them all, but the measures of our performance are often in the hands of our students.
We can be the hardest-working, most devoted teachers in the world, but when it comes down to it, that final AP exam score is in the hands of a living, breathing, fallible teenager with unique strengths and weaknesses, a potentially stressful home life, hormone-fueled emotions, and a still-developing brain that struggles to prioritize that soliloquy from Hamlet over the video their crush just posted on TikTok.
High-stakes testing is, for better or worse, an unavoidable part of teaching in the United States. At the highest level, SAT and ACT exam scores determine students’ admission to many of our country’s top universities. Post-No Child Left Behind, state testing no longer carries the weight it once did, but it’s still prevalent in K–12 classrooms across the country. Districts and schools create their own assessments to measure student progress. All of these pieces of data are used by students, parents, administrators, and society at large to “measure” the success of our daily efforts in the classroom. And what we’ve got to say today applies to all forms of high-stakes testing.
But an AP exam score has a unique power to shake the self-worth of even the most pragmatic teacher. The first week of July, when scores are posted, is uncomfortable in teacher Internet groups. Some teachers are thrilled, celebrating an AP exam score distribution heavy on 4s and 5s. Some teachers are devastated, wondering how their best efforts could have resulted in an AP exam score average well-below the “passing” score of 3. The comment sections on these posts become minefields as different outcomes and attitudes fill our feeds.
And we get it. We taught AP English Literature for 14 years. Steph teaches AP Seminar and AP Research online and tutors students in a variety of AP courses. We’re well-versed in the temptation to celebrate a high AP exam score and chastise ourselves over a low one. After all, it’s a one-year course that we taught, that we poured our best efforts into for the better part of a year.
But we’ve had to learn, often through a painful process of two-steps-forward-one-step-back, that no high-stakes testing result, AP exam score or otherwise, is our result. And the more we truly embrace that reality, the better able we’ll be to continue providing high-quality education to our students for years to come.
A Low AP Exam Score (or Other High-Stakes Result) Doesn’t Mean You Failed
It’s understandable that we’re hard on ourselves when high-stakes testing results are lower than we hoped they’d be, especially as AP teachers.
Most of us know that low state-testing scores aren’t “our” fault, no matter how much our principal implies that they are: after all, tests are often cumulative, no one can truly cover all the standards in one year, and few students have the incentive to give it their best effort.
But AP courses can feel different. After all, they’re a single-year course of which we’re the sole teacher, and most of our students are desperate to do well and earn scores that will get them credit at top colleges.
And many of us work hard to get the best results we can. Part of the reason we, and especially Kate, left the classroom is the feeling of utter futility that results from knowing you have done everything you can—there is no more effort left to give, there are no more hours in the day, there are no more possible angles to come at this from—and still not getting the results you want.
But that effort, that knowledge that we have done everything we can, is all we can control, and when we’ve done that, we have to let go of the rest.
We have 50-some minutes a day for 180 days to prepare each batch of students for whatever end-of-course exam they’ll face. That’s not a lot of time.
When we teach English, we’re not teaching a content-based course. We’re the final couple stops on a 13-year journey to become proficient in an entire language. We can help students to improve and refine their reading and writing skills, but we cannot undo years of systemic failures, pandemic-related learning losses, battles against addictive technology, and inadequate resources for teaching and learning English as a second language.
We also teach high school. We’re not seeing the type of gains that take place in elementary school, where a student may learn to read during their time in our class.
For a number of years, the district we taught in used the MAP Growth test to measure student progress. But when you look at the student growth norms published by the test makers, you can see that while a kindergarten student might be expected to achieve a growth score of 16.45 over a school year, a 12th grade student would only be expected to achieve a growth score of 0.52 over that same time period. This doesn’t mean the kindergarten teacher is better than the 12th grade teacher: it’s biology.
An AP exam score, in particular, is meant to replicate a grade in an introductory-level college course. College course. Our students are in high school. If they’re not yet able to earn top scores (read: 5s) in a college course, we haven’t failed! We’ve introduced them to skills and content that they’ll be better prepared for when they reach them at the developmentally-appropriate time.
And we still haven’t considered the fact that we have no control over whether a student didn’t get enough sleep, forgot to eat breakfast, had a fight with their best friend, or got their wisdom teeth pulled that morning [read: true story]. Life can get in the way of even the best teaching.
A High AP Exam Score (or Other High-Stakes Result) Doesn’t Mean You’re Amazing
Don’t hear what we’re not saying: you’re very likely a good teacher, maybe even an amazing one.
But if we’re going to acknowledge that as the final year (or two) in a student’s 13-year English education, we’re not responsible for their failures, we also have to admit that we’re probably not entirely responsible for their successes.
It’s not easy to admit this, especially if we have poured ourselves into our course. It takes humility.
Our students, regardless of subject matter but especially in English, had over a decade of preparation before we even met them. If they earned a 5 on their AP exam, they were already headed in that direction. We certainly helped them (and maybe we can even take credit for a few points), but we were responsible for the final stretch of a process they’d already been on for over a decade.
And when we see an AP exam score as “our” score, we take away from the student who earned it. It’s their score. We helped them, but when it came down to it, they took the exam that day.
When we’re not patting ourselves on the back for the 3s, 4s, and 5s, it’s a lot easier not to beat ourselves up when our students earn 1s and 2s (or whatever metric your high-stakes testing relies on).
Your Efforts Do Matter
None of this is to say that our efforts don’t matter. They do.
We still have an obligation to prepare students for the tasks that await them. If they’re being held accountable for success on an exam, we owe it to them to be familiar with that exam and teach them the skills they need to do well on it. We’re doing our students a disservice when we don’t.
We can offer our students resources, directly teach the content they need to know, provide them multiple opportunities to practice, and give them feedback on their performance.
There’s also something to be said for ensuring that all of our students are familiar with the test and have basic test-taking strategies. This is especially true if we teach in contexts where students don’t have the resources to pay top dollar for private tutoring and classes. Some students genuinely haven’t been taught these strategies, and it’s important to do everything we can to give all of our students equal opportunities to be successful.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that our classrooms should become “test prep factories,” where all we do is take and review endless practice tests. But we are helping our students when we know what’s expected of them and ensure they have the strategies they need in order to be successful.
A student’s AP exam score can also give us helpful information. We should consider what we did to prepare students and ask whether there is something we can do better. But this self-reflection is more productive when we’re able to remove the question of our value from the equation. You did your best, and that was enough. Onwards and upwards.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on high-stakes testing results (whether we’re talking an AP exam score, state testing, or something else entirely) and how you keep a healthy perspective about it. You can find us at hello@threeheads.works or on Instagram @threeheads.works. If you’re interested in hearing us discuss this topic more, we posted a conversation on YouTube about it. And if you need more encouragement like this in your inbox on a weekly basis, we’d love for you to join our email list!
