AP Calculus Bureaucracy

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Thank goodness this error was brought to my attention now while there is still time to do something about it, or else we could have had a crisis situation on our hands.

There has been a lot of bureaucracy involved in starting up an AP program at our school. In retrospect, I should have persisted with the original plan to get the information clearly from colleagues at other schools in China who already have the program up and running. I tried this at first, but gave up after little responses or veiled hints that others didn't want to share this information. Not much of a surprise, given the ultra-competitive vibe among different offshore schools in China. It's like we're each protecting our own little fiefdoms in different cities.

Anyways, make a long story short, I tried to set up this program on my own and it hasn't been going that well.

The key part in running an AP program involves submitting a syllabus to College Board to become audited. College Board is essentially the nonprofit organization in charge of the whole AP program.

Putting an AP syllabus together is the easy part. Submitting is the bugaboo. In theory you just create a user account and submit the audit online. But it's never that easy. The first obstacle involves finding your school on the list in order to get an access code for which to match the audit to.

So I signed up for a user account last October, and couldn't find our school's name on the list. I asked what to do. They said the principal needs to contact another company called ETS (Educational Testing services) and fill out a form in which to get an access code. The principal does exactly this, but ETS never gets back to him, and we still don't have our code.

Time to panic because the course audit is due at the end of January. During my winter holiday break in Thailand I pick "Shanghai AP Self Study" from the list and register as a home school teacher, and submit the audit to that "school". Within a day my syllabus is approved and we're rocking. So we just have to keep waiting for ETS to get back to us with those access codes.

Well, they never do of course. Time keeps on slipping. A few emails are sent back and forth and they ask for me or the principal to call them, which we don't because we are busy and there are time zone differences.

In general I hate making calls to North America or receiving them because it always has to be late at night my time when they are awake and chipper.

Anyways, a top student in my AP class comes up to me and asks what the deal is with registering for the AP exams as the deadline has already passed. No way, but it turns out he is right, and I start to panic. If we can't get students registered for that exam, then the entire year's worth of coursework will have been like pissing down the drain.

More research shows that while the deadline has passed for students to register to take the AP Test independently at a testing center in Shanghai, the ordering deadline has not yet passed. The ordering deadline is when an AP coordinator (that'd be me) can get the exams shipped directly to our school. The students would then write the exams on May 9.

In fact, we are still 8 days away from the priority deadline for ordering, and there are two more deadlines after that. In the worst case scenario, there is a "late testing scenario" in which the AP coordinator can order a different version of exams for students to take a late testing day on May 25. However, that will set the students back an extra $40 each which is not something that any of us wants.

While I'm glad there is still time, the problem remains on how to get those goddamn access codes so the exams can be sent to a specific school address that is registered in the database. I've been hounding the various companies with emails and will do the same with phone calls later tonight.

Due to exam security reasons, the exams can't just be shipped to any willy nilly address and that's why they have the access code system in place. Even so, I'm rather pissed off both me and the principal did all of our parts, but ETS left us hanging.

At this point it's a matter of urgency because there is no longer any other recourse. I was hoping that in case of a screw up like this, students could register by themselves but clearly it is too late for that now.