An Advanced Placement Program: Are Three Years Enough?

Abstract

The Advanced Placement program in German offers a challenge of the highest order to young students and their teachers. Within the framework of a high school program, the advanced placement candidate expected to achieve the degree of competence in the language skills and to develop the capacity for literary interpretation attained by the college student who has studied for three years. As the culmination of this experience, the candidate writes an examination, the level of which, according to the Advanced Placement Program Syllabus, is comparable to that of examinations given in colleges and universities after third-year college language courses and introductory literature The German committee advises in this syllabus that four years of study in high school are generally required to achieve the above aims. Yet a look at the latest figures available indicates that very few high schools offer a fourth year in German. The report of the Modern Language Association, entitled Foreign-Language Offerings and Enrollments in Secondary Schools (January 31, 1964), reveals that in the year 1962 only twenty-six states had schools offering four years of German. Of these, only ten states had an enrollment of over one hundred fourth-year students in the entire state. In a spirit of optimism, however, the committee goes on to say that longer sequences, beginning in junior high school, are established, more and more advanced placement candidates will be trained in regular fourth-year or fifth-year Again, statistics paint a less optimistic picture. In the entire United States in 1962, only 145 public school students were enrolled in fifth-year courses. Are teachers then to wait until junior high schools really do start teaching German before initiating an Advanced Placement program? Or should some teachers try the seemingly impossible and complete the equivalent of three years of college German in only three years of high school? With three times as many students enrolled in third-year courses as in fourth-year classes, it would seem advisable to make this attempt and thus raise the sights and demands of public schools.