An Idea for Unit Tests in Advanced Placement Courses -- My Approach

 When I started teaching Advanced Placement Statistics in 2013, I was excited, but pretty much clueless about how to grade. I think this struggle is common to most teachers who begin teaching AP classes. My approach to grading has evolved over the years and I think I have a pretty good approach, worth sharing for those who are new to AP. If you like it, feel free to use it. If you don't, I hope you find another great approach that works well for you and your students. 

**IMPORTANT NOTE -- The system I use was not developed in collaboration with any other teacher or entity. Do not infer that it is endorsed or backed by College Board or other AP teachers. You can find many approaches. This one may or may not work for you and your students.

In this post, I will describe how I structure my tests, how my test grades are calculated, and how my course grades are calculated (balance of assessments and other assignments.) I will link you to a sample Google Sheet with a fabricated class and scores. If you're handy with spreadsheets, you can create a copy and adapt it for your classes. For those who aren't super handy with spreadsheets, I'll also link to a simpler version of the spreadsheet that converts a simple percentage score into a scaled score using my scale. 

Test Structure

My number one goal for every class I teach is for students to LEARN. To me, that's more than learning for a particular test, or learning how to take a particular test. I want my students to take what they learn and be capable of applying it in the future, whatever their future holds. But the reality is the AP Exam is the final leg of their journey through an AP course, and the success rate on that exam often has a huge impact on how we are viewed as teachers. So my secondary goal is to get my the best possible scores they can get. An essential variable in that equation is whether or not they BELIEVE they can do well on the exam. I structure my unit exams to assess their knowledge and understanding AND to help convince them they can do well on the AP exam in May. 

Every unit exam in my AP courses is structured like a mini-AP exam.  I use problems from the question bank in AP Classroom for test questions. This way, students are exposed to AP-style problems throughout the course. This also allows me to create new tests every year without spending an inordinate amount of time doing so, making it difficult for students to compile lists of problems and pass them on to future students. AP Classroom allows the instructor to filter by topic, skill, and several other variables, so utilizing it for creating exams makes test creating a relatively simple task. Before AP Classroom, I spent about 8 hours making up each unit test. Now, nowhere near that.0000000

In AP Calculus, the unit exams are weighted half MCQ half FRQ. In AP Calculus a calculator-allowed part of the exam one day, and a non-calculator part of the exam the next day. Even though the calculator portion of the AP Exam is weighted less than the non-calculator part, mine are the same weight, only because class periods are the same length and adjusting them would make the whole process more complicated than it needs to be. Most would agree it's already complicated enough.

Different AP exams allow different amounts of time per problem. Early in the course, my unit exams typically allow about 1,5 times the allotted amount on the AP exam, adding questions to subsequent exams so that by the second semester the time per question on unit exams matches the time on the AP exam. This offers a sort of scaffolding so they're not just thrown into the deep end from the beginning, allowing them to develop the level of thinking it takes to successfully navigate AP-style problems in the time allotted. 

Grading Unit Exams

The difficulty level of the simplest AP Exam problems is far greater than the difficulty level of test problems most students are accustomed to before taking AP courses. Because of this, grading AP-style unit exams on a straight 90-80-70-60 scale typical in most classes would yield drastically lower grades, for exams and the course than kids taking AP courses are used to. It would not be long before no students sign up for your AP courses with the combination of extremely difficult exams and a typical grading scale.

An alternative would be to dramatically lighten the weight assigned to exams in your courses, but in my opinion, that would undermine the whole point of using unit exams to mimic the AP exam. So I decided the best option is to create a grading scale similar to the AP scales for 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. 

When I first started this, I used the average cutoffs for each score from the three secure practice exams available to AP teachers on the College Board website. Another goal I had at the time was to create a system where final course grades largely correlated to comparable AP scores. Opinions will vary on what an A in the class should score on the exam. For me, a 4 or 5 on the AP Exam should be achievable for a student who earned an A in the class. A 3 should be doable by a student with a B. A 2 could be a C or D student and a 1 an F. 

Of course, there are plenty of other variables that go into a student's AP Exam score that are not really translatable to a unit exam score. Things like motivation, future goals, senioritis, and others. We have to realize we can't design a perfect system and we'll have some A students make 1's and some F students make better than 1's. But we should be able to create a system with an observable correlation in general. That's what I've tried to create, and I feel pretty good about what I use.

My first attempt used the average percent of points required on the three secure exams for a 5 to get an A on a unit exam, points for a 4 a B, and so forth. Because an exam focusing on a particular unit is easier than a comprehensive AP Exam in May, I ended up with higher course grades earning lower AP Exam grades, on average, than my target. So I adjusted. 

Now, 75% of possible points on a unit exam in my AP classes earns a student a 90/100 in the grade book. A 65% earns an 80, 55% gets a 70, and 45% gets a 60. I then had to come up with a way to distinguish between a student who earned 80% of possible points and one who earned 90% on a unit exam. what I've come up with works pretty well I think. And it's a simple exercise in proportional reasoning. 

There are 10 possible points to get from 90 to 100 in the A range, but 25 possible percentage points from a 75 to 100 for a student to score on a unit exam. To get a student who earned more than 75% of possible points on a unit exam, I calculate the proportion of the 25 points they scored, multiply that by 10 points in the A range, and add that to 90. So a student who earned 80% of possible points on a unit exam would have a 92, calculated as follows...

80 - 75 = 5

 5/(100 - 75) = 0.2

 0.2(100 - 90) = 2

90 + 2 = 92 

If a student earned 68% of possible points, that falls in the B range and translates to a unit test score of 83, calculated as follows...

68 - 65 = 3

3/(90 - 80) = 0.3

0.3(75 - 65) = 3

 80 + 3 = 83

A person who earned 35% of possible points still earns an F on the exam, but their score recorded in the grade book is a 47, calculated...

35/(45 - 0) = 0.78

0.78(60 - 0) = 47 

AP Statistics and Calculus Unit Test Scoring Template 

When I started this scoring technique, my goal was twofold--to prepare students for the AP Exam and to align their grades in the course with their performance on the AP Exam. That worked pretty well until Covid struck. That year, my scores bottomed and my enrollment tanked the next. I'm still working to get the alignment back on track, and I think it will happen when we finally get enrollment back to semi-normal. 

Course Grades

In my courses, unit exam grades are worth 75%  each grading period. All other assignments--homework, participation, quizzes, etc--are worth 25%. I know some don't count homework for grades, and honestly I'd prefer it that way. But where I'm from, most of my students won't do the work unless it counts for something. They struggle to see the value in work other than the points it earns them. 

If you prefer not to count homework and other assignments, you might find it necessary to lower the thresholds for letter grades on the unit exams. These are set to align course grades and AP Exam grades while counting homework and other assignments for a fourth of the grade. 

Conclusion 

What works best for me with my students in my school may not be best for you and yours. Feel free to take from this what will work for you, change what you need to, or leave it all. Just wanted to put this out there in case it could help someone looking for something they haven't found yet. 

Whatever you decide, I wish you the best of luck.


 

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