The dangers of open access

When most of us start here as freshmen, we are coming in knowing that it’s going to be hard. At the same time, we need to take the toughest possible classes so that we can get into the best possible college.

Our friends are doing it, our friends’ friends are doing it, so we go along and sign up for Geometry Enriched over Geometry or Biology over Earth Science. We spend our summers inside windowless classrooms taking quizzes on similar triangles so we can take Algebra 2 Honors in the fall.

If that sounds depressing — it is. But it’s about to get much more stressful.

Until this year, school rules prevented students from signing up for too many AP/Honors classes as underclassmen, and no student was allowed to “skip” prerequisite courses unless they had extraordinary circumstances and demonstrated mastery of the subject.

With an expanded open access policy, however, this is no longer the case.

This policy allows students in any grade to sign up for any class, AP or regular, regardless of whether they have taken the prerequisite. They are not required to take a test demonstrating their knowledge; instead, they only have to sign a contract saying that they understand the school’s recommendations for the course.

For instance, in the math department, students are advised to move to the next level in the advanced math track only if they received a B- or higher in the previous class.  

This policy effectively allows students to make any choice they want about their schedules. While this freedom sounds tempting, pressure to be competitive for college and summer program applications, from both parents and peers, often overrides students’ better judgment in course selections.

As a result, it is likely that more freshmen will sign up for advanced courses, like AP Computer Science and Trigonometry/Precalculus Honors, that they may not be prepared for. This forces students aiming for admission in top colleges to do likewise to stay competitive, as virtually every college presentation includes the phrase “most rigorous course load available to the student.”

If a student does take a class he is unprepared for, he will risk burning himself out and making himself miserable — which could actually hurt his college chances if he do not do well in the class. Most Saratoga graduates, many of whom now attend prestigious colleges like UC Berkeley and CalTech, waited until their junior or senior year to take calculus with no adverse effects. Why change that now?

A halfway solution would be to administer placement tests to make sure students show mastery of prerequisite course material before allowing them to move on.

Some may argue that even if students make the wrong choice about what class to take, they are old enough to handle the consequences. And, of course, they can always drop to the regular version or the prerequisite.

But incoming freshmen decide their course load in March of their eighth grade year, when most of the class are still 13. Going into their first year of high school, they are wholly inexperienced in course selection and don’t know their limits yet.

Of course, high-achieving students should not be precluded from taking advanced classes they are ready for, provided they can ace a placement test. But the new policy might cause ill-prepared students to jump into an academic quicksand where they will surely drown.