The Advanced Standing Deficit

Advanced Standing is an established program whose educational merit is rarely questioned. In May 1954 the Faculty of Arts of Sciences voted to institute the program "in order to strengthen the continuity between secondary school and college and between college and graduate school, and to encourage able and mature students to enter the most advanced courses for which they are prepared." And tomorrow, nearly 45 years later, a new crop of first-years will file petitions for sophomore status. But since I filed my own such petition three years ago I have wondered: Is Advanced Standing an academically sound program?

It is a good time to ask this question, as the office of Dean of Undergraduate Education William Mills Todd III is currently reviewing, with individual departments, how Advanced Placement (A.P.) test scores could and should be used. But this type of review will simply reassess the "worth" of individual A.P. courses (a score of 4 or 5 on the United States history exam, for example, now counts for one full credit; four such scores would count for one year's worth of study); it will not reconsider the worth of the Advanced Standing program as a whole--a review which in my opinion is long overdue.

According to the Freshman Dean's Office, of the 704 students in the Class of 2001 offered Advanced Standing last year, 321 accepted. But of those, based on the results of previous years, the Registrar reports that only about 30 will actually graduate in three years, and an additional 15 to 20 will graduate in four with a master's degree on top of their bachelor's degree.

So for a very small, focused percentage of students, Advanced Standing is a good program; it gets them where they're going faster. Indeed, one of the two reasons Dean Todd gave me for keeping Advanced Standing (and the stronger one in his view) is that "there are students who can make good arguments to use it." But he also had this to say: "For most students, it's a misfortune and a missed opportunity" because "people who graduate in three years have skipped precisely those courses which will be most broadening for them."

With this kind of skepticism coming from the dean, it may be the other reason he gave for keeping Advanced Standing which cuts more to the heart of the matter, namely that "it helps attract good students to Harvard." Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis '70-'73 agreed: "We are quite certain that if there were no Advanced Standing program," she said, "we would be at a competitive disadvantage."

Is it ironic that Advanced Standing might have more to do with College admissions than it does with undergraduate education? Perhaps. But it would not be all that surprising--because on educational grounds, it seems to me, there is little to no justification for keeping the program alive.

Quite simply, four A.P. courses, taken in high school, are not equivalent to eight half courses taken at the College. This observation seems so obvious that it would not deserve mention--but for the fact that the administration does not regard it as true! And even if the material covered by a given A.P. course were comparable to the material in two half-courses (which I do not believe), it is plain that the gain derived from a year of college is greater than the sum of the individual courses which comprise it.

Furthermore, Advanced Standing is an anomaly, as it allows work done outside and before Harvard to count toward one's diploma. I was awarded no credit, for example, for a college course I took at Princeton University during high school, but my A.P. scores were happily accepted. Another reason Advanced Standing is difficult to justify academically is that the strong financial incentive to graduate in three years outweighs for some students the intellectual incentive to remain for a fourth. Finally, not all high schools offer A.P. curricula, which means that the advantages offered by Advanced Standing--saving one year's worth of tuition or obtaining a master's degree--are unequally (and somewhat arbitrarily) distributed.

Nevertheless, from what I have been told, it seems very unlikely that the Advanced Standing program will be abolished. It is an entrenched program here and could be too costly, in various ways, to terminate.

But the truth of the matter is that Advanced Standing is educationally unsound, and should not continue to exist in its current form, if at all. Most students realize this, which is why the vast majority of first-years who will accept Advanced Standing tomorrow will eventually rescind it. This is not to say that there are not students mature enough or focused enough to complete their undergraduate requirements in three years. But successful A.P. scores are arbitrary, unequal and poor indicators of either focus or maturity. More importantly, a complete college experience takes a full four years.

Daniel M. Suleiman '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.