A quiet revolution is picking up steam in the nation's private secondary schools, with broad implications for college admissions and for teaching and learning on both sides of the transition from high school to college. About 50 of the nation's leading college-preparatory schools have opted out of the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP)…

In most schools, the rush toward Advanced Placement (AP) courses goes on unabated. In 2006 the number of students taking AP exams increased almost 10 percent over the preceding year. This is largely because of the growing intensity of the admissions game and the urge on the part of college applicants to seek out every advantage. In applying to…

Minority students were about 25% of the student population at Central High School in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1995. But the composition of its honors and challenge classes did not reflect this diversity: Few minority students were taking challenge classes as underclassmen and even fewer were taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses as seniors. This paper…

This article highlights the expansion of the International Baccalaureate program in the United States due to the increasing amounts of interest among school districts in the subject of offering a more rigorous curriculum to be available for the students. International Baccalaureate programs, while very different from Advanced Placement programs,…

United World College of the American West (UWC-USA) which was founded in 1982 by the Occidental Petroleum magnate and philanthropist, Armand Hammer, is an upper-secondary school with 200 students and two dozen faculty from 80 countries or more. Situated amid traditional Hispanic settlements in New Mexico's scenic Sangre de Cristo Mountains,…