College Board cancels four AP exams, including its only test in Italian

Starting in 2010, the Italian, French Literature, Latin Literature and Computer Science AB exams will no longer be offered.

While the latter three tests are survived by other exams in their subject — the AP French Language, Latin: Vergil and Computer Science A exams — once the changes are implemented there will be no Italian AP exam.

The College Board’s executive director of communications, Jennifer Topiel, said in an e-mail that the organization, in its efforts to support “schools in their work to provide high-quality, college-level AP coursework to their students,” needs to allocate its resources “appropriately” to continue to provide high-quality support to AP teachers and students.

“To do this, we cannot continue to offer two separate courses and exams in several subjects,” she said.

By reallocating funding from the discontinued exams and by adding supplementary funds, Topiel said, the College Board’s financial investment in the remaining language exams will increase by about 50 percent. The funding will also supply all AP teachers with additional tools to educate their students.

Though Topiel said that the organization received little feedback on the cuts, which were announced less than a week ago, she said that some educators were “understandably . . . upset by the news.”

Reactions on campus from students and faculty were mixed.

Senior Italian lecturer Fiorenza Weinapple was concerned about the elimination of the Italian AP exam. “Obviously, this is not good news for us, although not many students do take that exam for the simple reason that Italian is not taught in high schools,” she said. “As far as the teaching of Italian in general, this move is not encouraging. Italian has really little room to grow in general,” she added.

Weinapple said, however, that incoming students would still be able to take the University’s own placement test to satisfy the language requirement.

Kevin Wayne, the Phillip Y. Goldman ’86 senior lecturer in computer science, said in an e-mail that the change will have a “minimal impact”on the department because few concentrators took the AB exam, “either because it wasn’t offered in their high school or because their passion for computer science developed after taking a course at Princeton.”

Wayne added that the department will “create some other mechanism forplacing qualified students in intermediate-level classes” throughinterviews or placement exams.

Joshua Herbach ’08, a computer science major who took the Computer Science AB exam, said he was “pretty indifferent” toward the decision to cut the exam.

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“It was a pretty silly exam,” he said. “The difference between it and the A version of it wasn’t that noticeable. And from what I’ve read, it seems like they’re going to try to make the A exam slightly more comprehensive, so if anything, the computer science curriculum in high schools might become more rigorous.”

“The AP itself certainly didn’t prepare me better for Princeton classes,” Will Fisher ’10, another computer science concentrator who took the AB exam, said in an e-mail.

Topiel said that since this is the first time multiple AP exams have been cut at the same time, the decision necessitated direct consideration by the Executive Committee of the College Board’s Board of Trustees.

“While we and the AP community feel great disappointment now, we are hopeful that five years in the future . . . they will agree that this was the right decision for their disciplines,” she said.

— Staff writer Samantha Pergadia contributed reporting