A New Curriculum for AP Biology

The College Board is rethinking the advanced placement exams, according to this New York Times article. After decades of overly-broad exams that cover anything imaginable within the scope of college-level introductory biology, the new exam will focus on fewer concepts.

A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. 

The scope of the new exam will be specified in a detailed curriculum (!):  

“We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” [CB Vice Prez] Mr. Packer says.

An official curriculum for AP Bio is a very good thing. The point has been made in other places that, in the absence of a specified curriculum, the test dictates what will be taught. That seems to me to be what has happened with many of the AP subjects, as teachers try to fit a large slew of topics into a single course. An explicit curriculum circumvents that.

Other changes, I am not so sure will be for the better. The old labs are out--too boring and predictable! Now students do "a host of more creative, hands-on experiments [...] intended to help students think more like scientists." I'm not convinced that change simply for the sake of change is necessarily for the better. Take this example of a new lab:

The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them.

All too often, the emphasis in teaching shifts to process over content, and while an exercise such as the above is a good way to get students to appreciate the thought involved in designing a good experiment, I worry that the balance will shift too far from the content side of the equation.

The new A.P. Biology exams will be given for the first time in spring of 2013.