The AP classes in American high school, which include a test which can provide college credits if passed were great in my opinion. Mostly because I felt the tests were really good. I took 11 of these tests and I learned a ton that has been relevant and stuck with me ever since. In particular statistics, comp sci, and Spanish seemed really good.
Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded conversations and giving responses.
Comp sci I didn’t take the class, just self studied for the test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn’t really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented concepts still seem familiar.
I think the two things that made these exams good is they were very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good grades, so they were pretty hard and didn’t advertise exactly what would be tested.
Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the concepts mastered.
Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams. Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public school experience.
Spanish was a hard test. It involved listening to pre recorded conversations and giving responses.
Comp sci I didn’t take the class, just self studied for the test. It was my first exposure to comp sci and only intro to object oriented code. The test made you utilize an API for a little toy problem. That was very good in retrospect. I didn’t really grok APIs until that exact moment on the test. 12 years later fiddling around with game engines, object oriented concepts still seem familiar.
I think the two things that made these exams good is they were very broad so you needed to have mastered the whole course, and they were not designed by a teacher incentivized to give good grades, so they were pretty hard and didn’t advertise exactly what would be tested.
Not needing 90%+ to do very well on the test was good too. So much of school is avoiding tiny mistakes on otherwise easy content to get a perfect score. Not broadly getting the concepts mastered.
Some neighbor schools offered AP classes but it was culturally accepted that students would not get high scores on the exams. Struck me as pretty pathetic. That was a rich kid private school doing worse than my (admittedly fairly wealthy) public school experience.