In many ways the new AP exam is better than the old one. There is no cloze exercise, and there are no discrete-item grammar questions. Grading is done holistically.
However, scoring is still based primarily on output, and no matter what anyone says, a typical high school program will not get students to the level for which AP is designed. I am certain that there are schools and students that are capable of attaining Pre-Advanced proficiency in four years, but they are not typical. My school’s most recent score on the state testing was 867, so we are not a low-performing school. However, our students as a whole will not spend the extra hours necessary to get sufficient exposure to the language to move higher more quickly.
In addition, AP still runs counter to my goals for the German curriculum in its Scope and Sequence. The emphasis in AP is on academic language (just as it is with Common Core), but is academic language what is most useful to high school students? Realistically, what will most students do with the language? Most will be tourists and talk to friends and family; that does not require academic language, but it does require interpersonal skills. To use the jargon: I am trying to help my students acquire Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), not Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). Students who wish to acquire the latter can do so after they have achieved proficiency in the former.
As a result, my class is geared toward Interpersonal Communication with an emphasis on conversation. As students move into years three and four, I do more content-based instruction but still with an emphasis on interpersonal communication. Students who wish to pursue taking the AP Exam are provided with resources for out-of-class study. I make certain they understand that I am willing to meet with them outside of class, answer questions, assist them, etc. However, with a mixed class of 3/4/AP, the majority of students are not planning to take the AP exam (not even most of the students who sign up for the AP Course). and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one – at least in this case. Besides, I can actually address the needs of the many, the few, and the one by providing the foundation in the classroom and the opportunity to go beyond outside of the classroom. To date I have had incredibly few take me up on the additional instruction time, and none of them for more than a couple of weeks, either at the beginning of the year or just before the AP exam.
Some might claim that my instruction lacks rigor because I am not pushing students to produce more and sooner, but I observe on a daily basis that most of my students struggle with meeting the rigor of sustained focus – not to mention depth and integrity of inquiry, continuous testing of hypotheses, and suspension of premature conclusion. My class is less onerous but more rigorous than many others they attend, and I have to deal with the need to keep re-focusing attention, hold students accountable for being there, etc.
At the same time I recognize that I can always improve my instruction and find ways to engage my students more fully. Taking advice from Plato, I seek to do it without coercion for, as he writes, “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” (Another thing to keep in mind is that the definition of “education” has changed; for Plato education was training in the skills of being human, not simply acquisition of facts. Or as Socrates puts it, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel”; in William Butler Yeats version, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.) Apropos lighting a fire, here is an interesting article from a psychologist on education: