Auditors Rejecting AP Course Syllabuses

College Board officials said such situations were rare. In 95 percent of the cases, they said, different auditors agree when shown the same syllabus.

Welsh said auditors seemed to be nitpicking rather than looking for information the College Board needs to know about an AP teacher. "One of the teachers who got a rejection back from the College Board said that she didn't include an explanation of how she was going to teach vocabulary," Welsh said. College Board officials said the auditors are simply looking for evidence of criteria developed by 6,000 AP teachers and 4,000 college professors.

Trevor Packer, College Board vice president for AP, said he was well aware of college faculty skepticism about AP teachers, which he said "is almost always based on complete and total ignorance of AP courses and exams." One important reason for the audit, he said, was to show college instructors how good AP actually is. He said surveys show the college reviewers "are coming away from the AP course audit inspired by the quality of the AP courses."

Another important reason for the audit, Packer said, was the need to bring AP teachers up to date on changes in topics that will appear on the three-hour exams in May. The exams are written and graded by outside experts. "When AP Comparative Government and Politics introduced the study of the Iranian government in 2006," he said, "we saw that hundreds of teachers of all experience levels . . . failed to incorporate the new content in their courses, completely unaware that the course had changed, even though we mailed the new course materials to every AP school."

Packer said that if the audit examined each teacher's record on exam scores, as some AP teachers suggested, "it would put inappropriate pressure on schools to deny entry into AP courses for students very able to benefit from a college-level class but uncertain of earning the top marks on the end-of-course AP exam."

Some local AP teachers said they were grateful for the audit. Alexander Case, AP coordinator and government teacher at West Potomac High School in Fairfax, said it was "an extremely useful way to reflect on the core concepts of my subject and evaluate what exactly were the topical emphases of my AP course." Sue Duncan, AP coordinator at Hayfield Secondary School in Fairfax, said many colleagues "felt the process fostered collaboration among teachers of the same subject, not only within the school but within the county."

O'Leary, of Cardozo High, said his syllabus was rejected because he didn't include exercises, such as his students' close analysis of the writing of novelist Edward P. Jones. He quickly added them and won approval. The process, he said, "validates what we are trying to do here," but he thinks that "the best way to see if the course works is the students' success in college."

Keener, of T.C. Williams, said his class description also was approved after he clarified two points. Last year, 29 of his AP biology students got the top grade, a 5. Eleven got 4s and two received 3s, the lowest score that can earn college credit. None of his students scored below a 3.

"In evaluating whether a course is truly on the AP level, I wish student performance had been included in some way," he said.