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The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program has been at the center of a nationwide education debate for years. Perspectives on the program are as varied as can be, making it difficult to reduce it down to a simple pro/con debate.
Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School is also navigating this debate. Some students and parents want to see more AP offerings, others are frustrated by confusion surrounding the waitlist process to get into AP courses, and yet others are concerned that students are disadvantaged in the college admissions process because they aren’t able to take as many AP courses as they would like to take.
In a November 19 presentation to the Lincoln-Sudbury School Committee, the administration outlined how AP offerings are managed at the school. They went on to share various perspectives on the AP program, the possible impact (or lack thereof) on college admissions, and some next steps for the high school.
Here’s the current state of enrollment in AP courses:
One of the nuances that was outlined in the presentation is that much of the demand for AP courses comes from double enrollment requests. That’s when a student wants to take more than one course in the same department, at the same time. For example – an AP Stats course with another course offered by the same department. In fact, the majority of requests to get into the most-requested AP courses appeared to be double enrollments. That puts pressure on each department, and in 2023-2024, the Math and Science departments were subject to staffing cuts as outlined below (the data was adjusted slightly for accuracy in the live presentation):
In the 2024-2025 school year, Lincoln-Sudbury added partial FTE’s back to the math and science departments, and that dropped the number of students not scheduled in AP Bio from 35 to 9. Notably, many of the students who didn’t get into an AP course still got double enrollments in the same department according to Leslie Patterson, the Director of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment at Lincoln-Sudbury.
At the center of the presentation was one of the defining aspects Lincoln-Sudbury’s philosophy: students are afforded the autonomy to make significant choices about their course mix, and the amount of choices available is quite high relative to other high schools. Patterson emphasized that this makes the scheduling process difficult, but she felt it was worth the effort:
“So this process is extremely time consuming and complicated because we offer such a breadth of course offerings at L-S. And that’s really an amazing thing that happens at L-S, that we allow for student choice, that we have these rich electives in english and history, math and science for our seniors. We allow double enrollments, we have students who are teaching assistants, a strong arts department, so scheduling is not easy. If we were a school that just had English 9, English 10, English 11, English 12, it would be no problem at all to schedule. And I’m glad that we are not that school.”
“So this process is extremely time consuming and complicated because we offer such a breadth of course offerings at L-S. And that’s really an amazing thing that happens at L-S, that we allow for student choice, that we have these rich electives in english and history, math and science for our seniors. We allow double enrollments, we have students who are teaching assistants, a strong arts department, so scheduling is not easy. If we were a school that just had English 9, English 10, English 11, English 12, it would be no problem at all to schedule. And I’m glad that we are not that school.”
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Later in the presentation, Superintendent Andrew Stephens emphasized how teachers are invested in and passionate about courses they helped develop, and that homegrown courses are often as rigorous or more rigorous than the AP courses. (1:02:50)
That seems to bear out in the data they shared. While Lincoln-Sudbury offers fewer AP courses than its peers, they allow students to take the AP exams, and Lincoln-Sudbury students perform the best among peer districts:
Superintendent Stephens highlighted that, because of declining enrollment and limited staff, adding more AP courses would come at the cost of another year-long course or two semester-long courses currently being offered. Some non-AP courses at Lincoln-Sudbury have waitlists, as well. He repeated the point about declining enrollment and the challenges it creates during the back-and-forth with the committee after the presentation.
But the administration was also very open to the feedback from students who want greater access to AP courses. In addition to improving communication around the AP waitlists, and exploring ways to increase access, Stephens described several steps the school would take to address concerns:
The members of the school committee appeared quite satisfied with the information provided during the presentation, and perhaps had evolved in their thinking on AP offerings. Member Maura Carty surmised: “So it’s funny I came into this with my own thoughts, I reviewed the presentation, and now I’m kind of coming out of it with I guess a more equitable [framing], I guess, is really the theme here…” (1:16:00)
Member Lucy Maulsby added that she felt the situation called for faculty-driven creativity, and noted her appreciation for the presentation. Chair Ravi Simon pointed out that the new course level designations are one example of a creative solution to the challenge of balancing AP offerings with the breadth of courses that Lincoln-Sudbury values.
All members appeared to agree that an open and public conversation about AP offerings was quite welcomed and appreciated. While there may be more to come on this topic in the future, everyone is now operating with the same baseline understanding of the current approach to AP courses at Lincoln-Sudbury.