By: Matthew Du; Staff Writer
Most of the Advanced Placement or AP classes here at Mills require a prerequisite for you to join that class while others do not require it. At Mills High School, AP classes in the science departments for the next school year won’t require any prerequisites. However, they are still going to be recommended.
Advanced Placement or AP classes are college-level courses that high school students can take for college credit. They used to require students to meet the set prerequisites to take those classes, but those prerequisites will be recommended instead of required for the next school year.
According to one of the Mills counselors, Rachel Mack, Mills is the only high school in the district to have additional prerequisites for a few classes in the science department. She said that there may have been some teachers who have felt that the prerequisites was a barrier to some students.
Ms. Mack said, “I think it’s something that our science department philosophically felt was important so that students could have a foundation in all three sciences in case they wanted to go on to major something STEM-related. If they had that broad exposure, but I think some concerns have been raised half throughout the years that could pose some barriers for some students to be able to take those courses.”
Mack adds, “Our district wants students to be able to have as much access as possible to AP courses without having too many requirements placed on them. They were maybe a little too stringent and possibly prevented students, especially maybe some students from historically underrepresented groups from being able to access our AP sources.”
Steven Wang, a biology and AP biology teacher at Mills commented, “Every AP class, whether there is a real prerequisite or not, has a certain requirement of things you need to know or things you need to be able to do to be successful in the class. You take the class, you want the college credit, you want to be challenged, but you also wanna be successful. The challenging thing, though, the problematic thing is that’s different depending on what department you’re in.”
Wang adds, “The district has a policy and says all students should be able to take AP classes. I wanna give them the benefit of the doubt, the district passed this board policy that says that AP classes should be available to everyone. We want them to be successful, have the background knowledge, the maturity, the academic skills to be able to perform at a college level. The Board is saying the language says everyone should be able to take it. That means there shouldn’t be a prerequisite. We’re all saying we want these classes available to everybody, and we don’t want anyone to feel I don’t look like an AP-style student. I’m not smart enough. We want everyone to be able to take it, but we want you to have a good chance of succeeding.”
Wang believes that the policy was written to prevent discrimination, teacher bias, and discouraging students from taking these classes. He believes that everyone should take the class, but they just need to be prepared for the rigorous and intense work of these classes.
Nils Headley, an algebra and AP statistics teacher spoke on his class and said, “So certainly for the math classes, there are areas of content and conceptual understanding that students need to have before they enter the class to make it as likely as possible for them to succeed in the class. In the past, prerequisites may have been used to arbitrarily keep out students at some schools. I’m not saying this has happened. But I think what the purpose of the policy change is to make sure that we give as much access as possible to students so that they can take high level college level classes, which can really help them save money, get through college and do well after high school.”
Freshman Nathan Lau (9) spoke on the matter, “I think that they were there for a reason. If you really wanna excel in the AP classes, then you should take the prerequisites of classes…I think that the newer students can have a better learning experience as they can choose which ones they want to learn and instead of just having to do it over the summer, they can learn more or learn what they prefer to learn.”
A junior Ethan Cabrera (11) who has taken four advanced placement classes said, “It opens up for new students that aren’t able to take a class, maybe people that don’t have the prerequisites like before there, and now they’re able to just take it. I think that taking the class before, I think it would help them. I think without the prereqs [prerequisites], I think it just encourages new people.”
Another junior Deshaun Liu (11) commented, “I understand why the prerequisites are there.. They’re to protect students from entering a class that’s too hard for them to handle. But there’s many students who want to go ahead, who are fully capable of going ahead. When a student fails a class because they’re not prepared enough, whose fault is it? It’s the student’s fault. You could just blame it on the students. So there is honestly nothing wrong with getting rid of the prerequisites.
Liu adds, “It was the students’ choice and it was the student’s fault.. So honestly, I think there’s nothing wrong with that because if a student does succeed, it was their choice and they were able to succeed because they no longer had to fulfill a prerequisite.”
If anyone needs help or support, you can always feel free to reach out to your assigned school counselors.
