Dartmouth College Will End Credit for Advanced Placement Tests

Dartmouth College will stop awarding college credits to students who earn high enough scores on Advanced Placement examinations, after concluding that the tests are not a rigorous enough substitute for its own courses, according to the Associated Press. One Dartmouth official said the institution’s psychology department had conducted an experiment in which students who received high test scores were given a condensed version of the introductory course’s final examination; most of those students failed that exam. The official said the college would still use the AP test scores to place students in appropriate courses. Policies regarding credit for AP tests vary at other Ivy League institutions, and the news service reported that at some of those colleges few students end up using AP credits to graduate early.