Colleges, not the College Board, determine university-level writing

What is college-level writing? And who determines what should count for college credit when the writing is located outside the university classroom? These questions need revisiting because the gap between what schools teach and what colleges expect from incoming students is growing, and we need to do something about it.

To understand this situation, it’s helpful to remember a time when US high schools taught college-level writing as they claimed. Consider, for instance, Berkeley High in 1984. Our teacher, the legendary Jacqueline “Jackie” White, assigned us a synthetic essay based on five novels by either Hemingway or Faulkner. Though I was an ambitious student – I was taking the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature and Composition course and destined to become an English professor – I wasn’t that ambitious. I chose Hemingway.

This research project aside, I don’t remember a minute of class time that semester spent prepping directly for the AP exam, which included multiple-choice questions about Pope’s Imitations of Horace and an analytical essay where we explained contemporary author and journalist Norman Mailer’s use of diction, syntax, imagery and tone. 

My exam score was a mediocre three out of five – which potentially qualified me for college credit but not much more. Mrs White’s eyes betrayed some annoyance about my result, but looking back, I appreciate both her high expectations for the major writing project and her nonchalance about test preparation. She taught me college-level writing, despite what the AP scores may say.

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That contrast is now unimaginable, as the trajectory has moved further away from the involved writing of the sort you do in college, and towards the test prep that counts for everything. Typically, AP writing is no longer college level – if it ever was – even though officially it must be so in order to count as college credit. 

Why does this matter for university educators? And what can we do?

It is those of us working at college level who determine what counts as “college level” writing, and we need to use that leverage. We decide if an AP score gets a student out of college writing altogether, partly or not at all. We communicate our standards and practices to high schools and to the College Board, which it uses to design their AP courses and assessments. And this in turn drives the writing capabilities of the students who arrive on our campuses.

College teachers need to understand what’s going on in these courses so we can push for a change.

The problem is systemic – and so requires a systemic response. At the University of California, Irvine (UCI), we have gathered striking data about the poverty of AP writing instruction. The good news is that the College Board itself already offers a decent solution to the problem: portfolio pedagogy.

For the sake of orientation, here is the UCI student population, which maps for these purposes on to the US pool of AP students more broadly. Our students typically take multiple AP courses; about 70 per cent of our more than 6,000 incoming first-year students, mostly from California, take AP English Language and Composition (Lang) in high school; about 30 per cent take AP English Literature and Composition (Lit); and about 40 per cent AP US History. But less than half of the total (44 per cent) have ever completed a substantial writing project for which they used multiple sources, revised at least once based on instructor feedback, and completed eight or more double-spaced pages. 

In short, the courses don’t teach what you might expect. Of our entire incoming class, for example, only 4 per cent of our students got their substantial writing experience – if they got one at all – in AP Lit. In AP US History, that number drops to 1.5 per cent.

If you look at the course guidelines for AP Lit and AP US History, those dismal numbers become less surprising. As opposed to Lang, which at least offers instructional guidelines towards more robust writing, Lit is about studying and appreciating literature, while AP US History emphasises historical thinking and reasoning, not research and writing. The assessments follow accordingly.

Everyone knows better, including the College Board. Over the past decade plus, it developed authentically college-level courses and assessments building up to AP Capstone, which is a diploma programme based on two year-long courses: AP Seminar and AP Research. Students do not have to take both, and each one does a good job in its own right. The research expectation is deep and is connected to student interest, the student work is substantial across length and modality, which includes formal presentation, and the writing process is what you would expect with rounds of feedback from peers and instructor, plus the time and support for meaningful revision towards a final form.

The scoring protocol is robust. AP scores for both Seminar and Research are based on teacher assessment of student presentation components plus College Board scoring of student-written components (plus an end-of-course exam for AP Seminar only). It’s robust in so far as you get both the instructor perspective over the entire course that is appropriately personalised, and then a College Board score that is appropriately objective, justifying why such standards exist in the first place. 

So, why not do all the writing-inclusive AP courses this way, assessing what the College Board calls “portfolios”? 

I asked that question recently as I was a visiting fellow in assessment for AP English Language and Composition. In a Zoom call with about 90 college-level fellows, College Board facilitators responded with regret. They like the portfolios too, and a few years back had started to explore how portfolio assessment might be expanded into other courses. Facilitators said the project had not gained traction because it would increase the workload of high school teachers unmanageably. And now there’s AI. Apparently, the College Board, like the rest of us educators, struggles to fairly assess student writing that is not proctored and timed.

But just as college-level writing instruction cannot become exclusively proctored and timed without a substantial loss in learning, College Board assessments can’t capitulate to worst-case cheating scenarios at the expense of the deeper learning desired by students, and by everyone else. There are post-AI paths that could boil down to the instructor-College Board collaborative assessment already in place, further adjusted so the authentic learning experience of the classroom is reinforced and, ultimately, verified. But that’s an essay for another occasion.

In any case, at the college level, it’s our job to know exactly what’s going on with the courses and assessments that can earn our college credit. It’s also our job to guide energetically how those courses and assessments appear by expecting that the College Board prioritise portfolio pedagogy, and by denying college-level credit where the courses remain something less by design.

So, in summary, here’s what you can do if you teach first-year college writing:

1. Survey your students to find out what exactly they wrote in high school, and adjust your teaching to close the gap.

2. Work with institutional research so that anyone can learn about the high school writing experiences of your university’s incoming students.

3. Serve on your campus committee that communicates with feeder institutions, and advocate for closing the gap with special attention to portfolio pedagogy.

4. If you are in the US, volunteer to be a College Board visiting fellow where you can lobby directly for portfolio pedagogy and related best practices.

Daniel M. Gross is professor of English and coordinator of campus writing and communication at the University of California, Irvine. He is a regular member of University of California Systemwide committees on preparatory and entry-level education.

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