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Advanced Placement courses and exams are crucial for students hoping for admission to top universities. But they haven’t always been – and they shouldn’t be now.

The AP program’s original purpose was to “provide assistance in placement and the awarding of college credit” to high school students, according to the College Board’s Web site.

With 10 times as many students taking AP classes as in 1980, according to The New York Times, it would be easy to think that the College Board has been successful in its aims.

But as the program has grown in popularity, students and schools alike have begun to move away from the program’s original purpose.

Instead, students use them to inflate their grade point averages and pad their applications, sometimes taking advantage of the fact that colleges accept students before their AP scores are available for consideration. Similarly, high schools use AP courses to raise their reputations.

These uses of the program are problematic because they inflate the value of AP courses. According to The Times, Harvard University no longer gives credit to students who received a score lower than five (out of five) on the exam. Even the College Board is concerned with the quality of the classes at some schools.

Another valid concern is that these exams have become a largely expected – almost necessary – part of admissions. And while admissions policies differ from university to university (some, like Binghamton University, told The Times they take AP courses into consideration with a holistic approach), many universities just tally a student’s number of AP courses.

This contributes to a circular rationale. Students take more AP courses to make their applications more distinctive, while university admissions processes encourage students to take even more AP courses (as long as they can receive good scores) in order to compete with this influx of AP-loaded applications. This encourages students to see their education as merely a numbers game.

The program needs to be reconsidered and revamped to return to its original purpose: letting high school students earn college credit. Until then, universities should change the undue consideration they give to AP classes.

The AP program’s ability to prepare students is debatable; various studies have come to different conclusions. But one study conducted by two professors at the University of Virginia, which questioned the AP program’s effectiveness, noted exam scores are not the strongest indicators of student success at a university.

According to the study, classes based on “depth-over-breadth” curriculum – science classes requiring ample mathematical skills and lab experiments that encouraged student exploration rather than finding predetermined results – were found to help students succeed later in college, whether or not they were part of the College Board’s AP program.

These are indicators of success that universities can take just as seriously – if not more – until the AP program is refreshed to original effectiveness.

With the College Board pushing so hard to prove its exams’ merits, and with President Bush trying to use standardized testing as a salve for the nation’s ailing education system, it will take the authority of a prominent university or university system – like UCLA and the University of California – to question its problematic aspects.