Kent School underwent an academic change during the 2020-2021 school year that seems slight, but it is more than what it appears to be: a change in one letter.
Mr. Hirschfeld’s arrival as Kent’s sixth Head of School had its concomitant changes. One was removing AP courses from the academic curriculum with Advanced Studies (abbreviated AS) courses to replace them.
The Advanced Placement Program was introduced into high school curricula in the 1950s; it served as a way of enticing veterans to attend college after serving their duty in the military. The opportunity to check off college introductory survey classes was attractive since it allowed students to save time and money. College was inconvenient for most veterans who wanted to pursue higher education because most of them had not attended high school in years. The advanced placement program encouraged veterans to move up in the world, but the program has since evolved into something else entirely.
Academic Dean Dr. MacNeil believes that several reasons account for the removal of the AP curriculum from our school.
The inefficiencies of the Advanced Placement program have reduced its benefits. The program was intended for a 180-day class schedule, which is impractical for a boarding school environment. Our diverse community consists of people from all over the world, who cannot stay far away from their families for a long duration of time: a reason for the long holidays and the time off from classes our school generously provides. Kent School has had success in giving students homework over holidays or before the first day of classes to help them cope with this, especially in STEM subjects. Yet this only applies to some of the 39 courses the curriculum has offered. The Kent academic program had seen, especially in the humanities subjects, that students could have done better because they simply needed more time for adequate preparation.
The flaws of the program’s philosophy have also caused Kent School to remove it from the academic curriculum. Kent School encourages students to develop skills, understanding, and the ability to apply that knowledge to new situations, but AP courses are more focused on absorbing heaps of material, not to say that it is almost rote memorization at this point. The goal at the end of the day is to maximize your score in the culmination of the course: a large four-hour exam.
The new Advanced Studies courses provide teachers with much more freedom to develop their own curricula that meet students’ needs. Kent has still incorporated AP exam material into several courses of its academic curriculum since introductory undergraduate courses hardly differ from one another. This incorporation has permitted interested students to take these exams as they please.
