Home > Grants > Advanced Placement Consortium Project (APCP)

In 2007-08, the San Diego County Office of Education, along with the North County Professional Development Federation, completed 
the objectives for the Advanced Placement Incentive Program Grant. The goals of the grant were simple: within three 
years, increase enrollment by ten percent of the number of students identified as low income in Advanced Placement courses; and 
also within three years, increase by three percent the number of low-income students who successfully pass the accompanying 
Advanced Placement (AP) tests. 

Accomplishments 
The project was highly successful at training teachers, with 353 teachers completing 40 hours of training through the APCP program, 
greatly exceeding our target 280 teachers trained by the end of year three. Furthermore, an additional 478 teachers participated in 
between 1 and 39 hours of APCP training workshops, for a total of 25,245 hours of training time provided by this grant.

Enrollment in AP 
The goal of the project was to raise AP enrollment of low-income students by ten percent by the end of the grant period. We exceeded 
this target by raising low-income student enrollment by 33%. The overall population of students taking AP classes rose eight percent, 
so the growth of low-income student enrollment was much faster than the rest of the student population, indicating the success of the 
APCP project at promoting recruitment of low-income students into AP classes.

For nontraditional students to realize academic success in rigorous courses such as Advanced Placement they must be academically 
prepared. Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) supports this goal. The project supported the training of AVID teachers, 
coordinators, and administrators, resulting in an increase in the number of sections offered projectwide. We have increased the 
number of AVID sections by 18.3% since the baseline year, which represents a significant increase in making this pre-AP program 
available to project students.

The final year (2007-08) showed a tremendous jump in both the number of students taking AP tests, as well as the total numbers of 
AP tests being taken, both overall and in all subgroups except females. The largest gain was in low-income students, which shows 
that the APCP program has done well in its goal of not just recruiting low-income students into AP classes (as in Objective #2), 
but also in encouraging them to take AP tests in large numbers. The program had a goal of more than ten percent increase in the 
number of low-income tests taken, but we more than doubled the goal, with an increase of more than 20.6% in the number of low-
income tests taken. 

Interestingly, the number of males taking AP tests climbed sharply this year, contrasted against a slight decline in female test-takers. 
Since our formative project evaluation reports showed that males were being under-represented in AP tests, one of our subsidiary 
goals was to encourage more recruitment of male students, and encouraging more male students to take AP tests. These results are 
very promising, and show that even though male students are still under-represented 1.5 to 1.0 versus female students, project 
activities have been successful in starting to meet this inequality.

The results in 2007-08 showed a large increase in the number of low-income students taking AP classes. Examining the classes 
showing an increase, we see that AP Calculus AB, AP Computer Science A, and AP Physics B all showed modest but notable gains. 
The largest increases, however, were in AP English Language, AP English Literature, AP Spanish Language, AP US History and AP 
European History, showing that language and history classes have been the most successful at recruiting low-income students into 
AP classes. This is a valuable piece of information – going forward, schools (both in the APCP program and around the nation) 
wishing to increase their numbers of low-income students in AP programs might wish to focus their recruiting efforts on these 
subjects, since they appear to have the most success.

Other numbers we have noted in past years remain. Male students, while under-represented in the total population overall, take 
traditionally “male” classes such as AP Physics or AP Calculus at equal or higher rates than female students, while language classes 
still have almost a two-to-one ratio favoring females over males. Hispanic and/or Latino students, while enrolling in AP classes at 
almost half the rate of white students, have five times the enrollment in AP Spanish Language as white students, and ten times the 
enrollment in AP Spanish Literature, whereas white students enroll in AP Physics B at four times the rate of Hispanic and/or Latino 
students. In other words, while enrollment is up overall, and the overall program has been highly successful in raising enrollment 
in student populations that have been traditionally underserved, there are still gender and race inequalities in enrollment that can 
be addressed by project sites moving forward.

Schools participating in the AP Consortium Project have been highly successful at both increasing the numbers of AP tests taken, as 
well as the qualifying rate on AP tests. Notably, low-income students qualified at a higher rate than ever before, even with an influx 
of a population of low-income students 33% greater than last year. This shows that APCP project teachers are successfully able to 
apply their training in AP workshops to improve student learning outcomes to the students who need it most. Low-income students 
are now qualifying at a rate of 43%, up sharply from 34% just two years before. We greatly exceeded our goal of increasing the pass 
rate by three percent -- by increasing it by nine percent in low-income students.

Participating districts
	Borrego Springs Unified
	Escondido Union Elementary
	Fallbrook Union Elementary
	Fallbrook Union High
	Grossmont Union High 
	Julian Elementary
	Julian Union High
	La Mesa-Spring Valley
	Mountain Empire Unified
	Oceanside Unified
	Ramona Unified
	San Diego Unified
	San Marcos Unified
	San Ysidro Elementary
	Sweetwater Union
	Vallecitos Elementary
	Valley Center- Pauma Unified
	Vista Unified