St. Michael-Albertville High School Recognized for Advanced Placement Class Offerings

St. Michael-Albertville High School was one of only 14 high schools in Minnesota and 388 nationwide to be recognized by the College Board for their dedication to helping students achieve at higher levels through Advanced Placement (AP) courses. The local school was placed on their AP Achievement List for increasing participation in AP classes while still maintaining or improving the percentage of students scoring a three or higher (on a scale of five) on their end of the year AP exam.

From 2008-2010, the high school increased pupil participation in AP classes from 81 to 128 students in their six course offerings: world history, calculus (AB and BC), English literature, physics and psychology.

Gregg Greeno, the school’s AP calculus teacher, said he felt the school’s switch to a weighted grade point average (GPA) a few years ago helped encourage more students to challenge themselves with these harder courses, while before some students were hesitant to do so and potentially hurt their GPA. Plus, each course is demanding: all AP course’s curriculum and syllabi must be certified and approved by the College Board to verify its rigor.

“We know that a rigorous high school curriculum taught by teachers with high level skills and high expectations for students will provide an opportunity for STMA students to excel in college,” said Marcia Ziegler, Superintendent of St. Michael-Albertville schools. “Advanced placement courses expose STMA students to challenging coursework like they will experience in college with the support of our excellent high school teachers.”

 Even with the participation increases, the school even logged a small gain in the number of students passing the year-end exam, from 72 percent passing in 2008 to 73 percent in 2010. Greeno said it can be difficult to maintain these high test scores because as the number of students in AP classes increase, the class make-up begins to widen from only those highest-achieving students.

Greeno said taking advanced placement courses is a boon to students in more ways than one. For instance, he gets the entire year to cover the same material that a typical Calculus 1 college course would cover in just one semester. This gives students the chance to really grasp the information and they still receive the same college credit for taking the class if they pass the AP exam at the end of the year.

And let’s not forget the other big bonus: college credits in a high school class equals free credits, something that no student would complain about in the face of skyrocketing tuition. The setting for these AP classes is usually more intimate than a traditional college course, allowing more time for individualized instruction.

 “I remember being in college math classes with teachers writing on the board, and nobody in the class is actually understanding what they are writing because they are going so fast,” Greeno said. “My goal is to write on the board and have them know what’s going on. We’ve had really phenomenal success.”