Lacking funding, College Board cancels AP Italian exam

The College Board announced Thursday that it will suspend the five-year-old Advanced Placement (AP) course and exam in Italian Language and Culture after this May, citing lack of funds to continue offering the program.

Last April, the College Board announced that it would only continue to offer the program if supporters could raise enough outside funding.

“The valiant effort to raise the needed funds was confounded by the unforeseen challenge of the current economic situation,” College Board president Gaston Caperton said in a statement.

The College Board, however, is not against the AP Italian program in principle.

“If at some future date the funding partnerships needed to support an AP Italian program arise, the College Board will consider renewing work to develop and offer the AP Italian course and exam,” according to the statement.

Supporters of the program were expecting the government of the Italian Republic to help provide the $1.5 million the College Board said it needed to continue operating the program. The national government of Italy funded more than half of the program’s original costs.

This time around, however, support has not been forthcoming.

“The Republic of Italy did not fully appreciate the importance and significance of the AP Program in Italian Language and Culture,” Italian Language Foundation (ILF) president Margaret Cuomo, daughter of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, said in an interview.

“The ability to reinstate the AP Program in Italian is in the hands of the Republic of Italy,” Cuomo added.

The ILF was founded with the goal of raising enough money to keep the program going. From July to November 2008, it secured $650,000 in commitments from donors in both the United States and Italy. These donations, however, were conditioned on the financial support of the Italian Republic, Cuomo said in a letter to Italian education advocates.

French and Italian department associate chair Gaetana Marrone-Puglia said in an e-mail that the College Board’s actions go against the original structure of the AP Italian program.

“It was our understanding at the time that the College Board would implement the program in high schools and would finance it,” she said. “However, the College Board now asks that we continue to finance it.”

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Marrone-Puglia added that the College Board’s funding requests are discouraging the Italian Republic from continuing to support the program.

“This is the primary reason why the Italian government is no longer contributing,” she noted.

The College Board’s decision to suspend the AP Italian program has been influenced by many factors, one of them being relatively low rates of student enrollment in the program, according to The New York Times.

Only 305 U.S. high schools offer the AP Italian program, in contrast to the 6,400 that offer AP Spanish.

The higher costs of using the pen-and-paper test also contributed to the suspension of the Italian program.

For instance, while roughly the same number of students took the AP Japanese test in 2007 and the AP Italian test last May, the computer-based Japanese exam is much cheaper to administer.

Even though the French and Italian department has promised to continue administering its own advanced placement exam for students wishing to take Italian, the suspension of the program might affect some of the department’s intermediate courses, Marrone-Puglia explained, though she said she does not expect any drastic changes due to the suspension.

“Italian at Princeton has increased steadily over the last two decades,” Marrone-Puglia said. “We do not anticipate a decline in our enrollment figures.”

Though the University’s Italian curriculum will be minimally affected by the suspension, relations between the United States and Italy might be more adversely impacted, Cuomo said.

“Italian language education is an essential part of the bilateral relations between the U.S. and Italy in trade, commerce, industry, culture and education,” she explained.

Cuomo said that she would like to see Italian education advocates publicly express how Italian education and culture have affected their lives so that funding for the AP Italian program may be more easily obtained.

“This is the moment when students and teachers of Italian should express their insights regarding the AP program in Italian to the Republic of Italy,” she said. “They should describe the positive impact that the AP Italian has had on their lives and how the lack of the AP Italian will adversely affect them.”