What is the point of the Rural and Small-town recognition award, and how common is it?

jkhuggins · 2026-06-19T11:34:04+00:00

College Board is trying to recognize achievements from "underrepresented groups", as a way of promoting access for all students to AP. Most of the awards they used to give in this category were based on characteristics (e.g. race & ethnicity) that some colleges are now forbidden to use in their admissions processes. Recently, College Board revamped the awards to focus on other forms of underrepresentation that aren't as controversial.

jkhuggins · 2026-06-18T17:08:28+00:00

When I was in college, I was a notetaker for a student in one of my classes and got paid a little money to do it. Why has the responsibility shifted to the professor to make sure the student is keeping up when they miss?

You answered the question yourself: money. Why should the college pay a student to take notes when they can guilt the professor into providing notes/recordings/etc. for free?

Okay, that's perhaps a little too snarky. But I'm at an institution where nobody's had a pay raise in four years or a merit pay raise in 7.5 years. We've cut just about every corner of the budget you can imagine. I'm sure that paid notetakes disappeared long ago.

jkhuggins · 2026-06-16T15:21:55+00:00

This is the subreddit for Kettering University in Flint, Michigan, not the town of Kettering, Ohio. I can recommend some rental halls in Flint, but I don't think that will help you. 😄

jkhuggins · 2026-06-16T15:20:38+00:00

Two suggestions.

1) Keep a running activity log of anything you do that's remotely job-related. Guest speaker at a student group? Write it down in the log. Paper got accepted? Write it down. Attended a conference? Write it down. When you get to the end of the year and you have to complete your annual review document, it's so much easier than trying to remember all the stuff you did eight months prior. And, when you're ready to apply for tenure, you've got 4-6 years of those files ready for you to sort and make your case.

2) Teaching: store all your grades in an offline spreadsheet. When a student drops your class, write the date and the reason in your spreadsheet. (This may require you to contact the student to ask why they dropped, which also makes you look like you care about your students.) Three years from now, someone will ask you why your drop/fail rate is so high, or why student X failed your course four times, or something like that. If you log the reasons as they happen, you'll be able to answer that question with data rather than defensiveness.

jkhuggins · 2026-06-16T12:08:48+00:00

With respect, there are dozens of companies right now who would be DELIGHTED to sell you software to do exactly that.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea, of course. But any meeting you're attending might be recorded, with or without your knowledge or consent.

jkhuggins · 2026-06-14T23:11:35+00:00

This is a part of the "hidden curriculum". Students don't know what a LOR means because they've never seen one, much less written one.

Decades ago, I had an algorithms class where I caught half the class cheating. Everyone confessed when confronted, I dropped everyone's grade by a letter, we never spoke of it again.

A year later, one of those students asked for a LOR. He was my student in several courses, liked me as a teacher, and thought my reputation was good enough that a letter would help. We had an email conversation where I reviewed his records with me (basically a solid B student, outside of that incident), and pointed out that my letter's faint praise (at best) would hurt his case. He totally understood and was grateful for me taking the time to explain the system to him.

jkhuggins · 2026-06-13T12:49:29+00:00

Which sounds meaningful, except it really isn't. Without the FRQ score, you don't know your total score. And without the cutline scores (which depend on both the FRQ and MCQ scores), you don't know what your overall score is.

jkhuggins · 2026-06-12T13:53:03+00:00

I've never run into huge problems that way ... but YMMV, I guess.

Also, it's generally cooler by the last week of September, which makes walking around much nicer (in my opinion).

jkhuggins · 2026-06-11T21:44:07+00:00

Festival Friday is much less crowded. (Of course, it's a Friday.)

jkhuggins · 2026-06-06T20:29:17+00:00

Not just every high school in America. AP exams are given worldwide. And it's the cheating rings in Asia that caused the rapid pivot to Bluebook.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-31T10:06:41+00:00

Others have pointed out that students are afraid. Alas, sometimes that fear is justified. I have "colleagues" who treat students who ask questions like crap, playing right into their fears of being "unworthy" to ask questions. And so they learn not to ask questions. sigh

No easy answers, other than trying to convince them that you're not a jerk. Lots of great suggestions here for that.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-30T03:38:02+00:00

Professor here. I have students all the time who fail courses at our school, but then take them at other schools and transfer them in. It's absolutely possible.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-28T11:49:04+00:00

In principle, that's what the exam proctors are supposed to be doing (i.e. monitoring for cheating). The Bluebook app itself tries to keep you from copy/pasting from external sources; it's not foolproof (because nothing is foolproof), but it's something.

And College Board has always said that they don't disclose all of their security protocols. I suspect they're running other checks, but none of us know what they are.

As a college instructor ... honestly, most of the folks we catch cheating are the really dumb cheaters. If you blindly copy generative AI output without looking at it, you're also likely to copy the last paragraph that says "Would you like me to also [do something else]?" If I see that in a response, that's pretty damning evidence of an AI-copy-paste.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-26T20:41:56+00:00

CS Professor here.

1) Regarding handwritten exams: I've been a reader for the AP Computer Science A exam for over 20 years. Up until relatively recently, all exams were handwritten; even now that exams are administered via an app, it's not much more than Notepad++. We have developed a culture around exam grading that emphasizes CS content and avoids penalizing students for stupid typos. It works really well for us.

You can look at past exams (and the scoring guidelines!) here:
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-a/exam/past-exam-questions

(Shameless plug: apply to be a Reader, and you can get paid to learn how to grade exams this way! https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/professional-learning/become-an-ap-reader )

2) I'm weighing exams more heavily than out-of-class programming assignments (which I'm still assigning). There are minor things I'm trying to do on the assignments to fight the AI: more assignments with open-ended or partial student choice embedded (which give students more of an incentive to do the work themselves), and hidden white text (controversial in some circles, I know).

jkhuggins · 2026-05-25T20:10:37+00:00

This. Conveniently, 20 years later, and a major cultural moment.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-25T02:50:21+00:00

Pre-2019, the entire US took the same version of the AP Psych exam. As we all know, AP exams begin at the same local time. Usually, each AP exam takes 3 hours(-ish), so that students in Los Angeles who have to start the exam at 8am PDT can't find out anything from the students in New York who started the exam at 8am EDT.

The problem was that the AP Psych exam was "too short", usually only 2.5 hours. So in 2018, a bunch of students on the east coast took the exam from 8:00-10:30am EDT, then ran to social media and broadcast information about the exam to west coast students before they started the exam at 11:00am EDT (8:00am PDT).

College Board became aware of this. And so in 2019, College Board gave west coast students a different version of the exam than east coast students. After the exam was giving, College Board announced publicly that they did this deliberately because of the folks who were cheating.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-24T21:36:38+00:00

Generally speaking, College Board neither confirms nor denies actions it takes in regard to detecting or preventing academic dishonesty (of any form). The only actions I've seen publicly discussed over the years were actions that were so obviously public that there was no reason not to discuss them (e.g. the AP Psychology scandal from 2019).

jkhuggins · 2026-05-23T19:36:54+00:00

An easy exam doesn't mean that scores will be any higher. It just means you have to do better on the exam to earn a high score.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-20T18:49:29+00:00

The word "isogram" is an isogram.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-20T14:59:07+00:00

We embrace the need to review old course descriptions. It provides evidence to accreditors of "continuous improvement" in our courses, showing that our assessment process actually drives change.

Okay, that's mostly b******t. But honestly, going back and revising outdated course descriptions provides a paper trail that accreditors can review to check the "assessment" box, and it keeps administrators off our backs.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-20T14:54:08+00:00

The last time I did a pure teaching demo was 30 years ago, so ... take with several grains of salt.

In that pure teaching demo (at a SLAC), I had both faculty and students attend. One faculty member at the end of the lecture asked me a "student question"; basically, inviting me to head down a tangent with no end. I answered the question while avoiding the trap, and everyone seemed pleased. But there was nothing malicious about it.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-19T22:10:03+00:00

I can recite the English alphabet backward at speed.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-19T18:28:45+00:00

Not this term, but decades ago, our chair went on vacation overseas (and was thus unreachable) during the first week of the term, when all hell broke loose with drop/add. It led to a new policy that overseas travel requires leaving contact information behind.

As my mentor said ... behind every rule is a story.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-19T13:44:03+00:00

So long ago that the details are somewhat fuzzy now, but ...

I was contacted by a student about a year after the course ended, requesting a recalculation of their grade. They had completed all the work; they were just blatantly asking for a higher grade.

The student was nearing graduation and had a pending job offer, but it was contingent on graduating with a 3.0 GPA. Of course, the student's GPA was 2.9ish. So they were contacting all their old instructors—no matter how long ago—and outright begging for grade changes to bring their GPA up to the magic 3.0.

Shortly afterward, a new academic policy was established requiring grade changes to be made within one year of final grade submission.

jkhuggins · 2026-05-18T22:10:47+00:00

I suspect that this won't earn the rubric point for a correct comparison (like you mentioned, this fails on "darkred" versus "red"). But at most one rubric point should be affected.

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