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College Board Wants to Cut Thousands of Years from AP World History Test

College Board Wants to Cut Thousands of Years from AP World History Test

“start at the year 1450 instead?”

This is one of the greatest problems facing higher education today. Not enough students have even a decent understanding of history.

From the CNN Wire Service:

The College Board wants to cut thousands of years from its AP World History test — teachers aren’t having it

If you ask the company that runs the Advanced Placement tests, it’ll say it was trying to do world history teachers a favor.

There’s just too much history to cover and not enough time. So why not cut thousands of years from the AP World History test — and start at the year 1450 instead?

If you ask the teachers, they say such a move leaves out key events from the past, such as the massive Mongol Empire and the Middle Ages, and presents a very Eurocentric view of the world.

That’s a battle that’s brewed for a month between the two sides.

Now, the College Board — the company that owns the AP program — is offering a compromise: it’s going to figure out a way to start “several centuries” earlier than 1450. It just doesn’t know how early.

And until the board decides in mid-July, teachers are unlikely to be satisfied.

“Even if they push back the gate a bit, we won’t be satisfied,” said Merry Wiesner-Hanks, who leads the World History Association and formerly developed the course and the test.

“Students — and really, people — need to see the bigger picture and the long history of the past.”

Featured image via YouTube.

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Comments

They would just start history at 40 to 50 thousand years ago, that would be about. Leave the earlier ages to other disciplines than History.

Oh, I forgot, a well educated high school graduate of 1960 knew more than a college graduate of 2018. So we don’t want to hurt the feelings of the recent High School graduate.

(Why bother testing them at all. Just give them a progressive education so they will vote democrat for what will be left of our future.)

And of course, starting that late leaves out the whole AD/BC issue (now designated by entirely different initials for no reason whatsoever). They don’t have to mention the origins of ANY of the major religions that way. Win! (But they can still cover Communism. What an interesting coincidence)

Most importantly, leaving out most of human history leaves more time for really important things like self-esteem and anthropogenic climate change.

We used to think ignorance was bliss but lately it looks like hard work!

AP courses have become a joke. I took AP history and it was tough. Being in one of the toughest high schools in the State and one considered among the very best in the country, I was one of 5 students selected by the history department to take the course. And the test was entirely objective. No opinion. You had to write in the correct fact.

    healthguyfsu in reply to puhiawa. | June 26, 2018 at 7:54 am

    It is HIGHLY dependent on the school and school system. That said, there is a general trend towards rigor dilution and pandering.

JoeyFalconi1 | June 25, 2018 at 10:33 pm

Why not just start with 1946? I bet 90% of high school or college kids can’t identify the two British PMs and the two American Presidents in office during WW2.

nordic_prince | June 25, 2018 at 11:38 pm

Well, they’d certainly have more time available for teaching history if they left out all the LGBTQIAXYZPDQ crap.

I graduated college in 1975 and a few years ago, having some time on my hands, I thought I would convert my English minor into a English BS being that it was on my bucket list. Either I have become profoundly brilliant over the last 30 years or the course work has been dumbed down to the point of absurdity. When caught in an in class quiz requiring us to write half a page on something we were supposed to have read the night before (and I had not), I would write a page of utterly mindless BS and include a short quote for the reading passage. I rarely got a 9 out of 10 for I mostly got 10’s. On the mid-term and final I scored 98 and 99 (out of 100) respectively and the only studying I did was to memorize authors names and their works.
>
Thinking this course was an outlier and not one truly representing the rigor required for a BS, I took another and it was even simpler and far less challenging (if that was even possible). While this was all shocking to me, what really left an impression on me was listening to students in both courses as they continually and universally complained about the difficulty of these courses and how they did not understand how the university could demand so much from them. In both cases, when grades were posted (by student number to maintain confidentiality), few A’s were awarded with the rest being B’s and C’sand not a single F. I seem to recall a solitary D grade.
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Needless to say, I was shocked and dropped out. My dream/goal of getting a BS in English Lit. has been snuffed out for it clearly is not longer any kind of accomplishment worth the effort or cost. Likewise, I have been shocked to the core at the abysmal level of knowledge and thinking exhibited by my fellow students. I hope and pray that my experience was an outliers and that students everywhere else are being challenged fare more and exhibit stronger thinking skills, but I do not think that is or was the case which saddens me. My conclusion is simply that college is nowhere near what it used to be and our best and brightest are not going to be able to compete well against our international competition.

    lc in reply to Cleetus. | June 26, 2018 at 8:52 am

    Cleetus, I do hope you will return. Those college kids need you! They need someone older and wiser in that classroom to point out the bs they hear/see on a daily basis. They need someone to tell the truth and point out the real history of things instead of the propaganda foisted upon them. I urge anyone with enough time, to go and audit college classes- history, English, -perhaps not hard sciences- to help save these students and thus, our country!
    Thank you.

    ss396 in reply to Cleetus. | June 26, 2018 at 9:41 am

    This happens across the ages. I did my college a little bit ahead of you. There was a four semester English requirement for everyone. In one course, from various comments by the instructor I think he was as wearied by the inanity of my classmates as I was. Later on I had another English course that was equally tedious.

    Still, in that same institution, I also had an English course which was the most lively and spirited course that I ever had. Indeed, some friends warned me to not take the course from that instructor because she was very tough. I had a ball! I still remember that course fondly.

History means all history, as far back as there is any record. Everything that came before has had influence on what came after, and is useful and relevant to understanding how we arrived at the situation that exists today. There is much to be learned from the Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Persians, and everyone thereafter, since we are still repeating most of the mistakes that destroyed their empires, economies and cultures.

The present education system should be burned to the ground. It’s become mostly about social and political indoctrination, rather than imparting useful information, or training in critical, logical and independent thinking. It isn’t repairable with the same people running it, or under the same rules.

I hear lefties would rather start history with jFK’s presidency.

The best non-science course I took at Oberlin was Bob Neil’s “German History since 1914.” Sadly he has retired and no one is there to show the antifa how they are acting *exactly* like the 1933 fascists.