Record number of Ind. sophomore students to take PSAT exam today

There will be a record number of Indiana 10th grade students taking the PSAT exam today, and it is doing a lot more than preparing students for the SAT.

More than 69,000 high school sophomores have registered to take the PSAT exam, a standardized test that serves as a practice test for the SAT and is also a diagnostic tool to identify students’ qualifications for Advanced Placement courses and credit.

The PSAT exam being administered today comes at no charge for students and comes out of the state’s education budget, according to the PSAT fact sheet available from the Indiana Department of Education.

The department’s goal for 2012 is that 25 percent of all Indiana students will pass at least one AP exam. In 2008, 19.8 percent of Indiana students were enrolled in AP courses.

Today, Indiana students account for about 28 percent of 10th grade students taking the PSAT in the Midwest, according to the College Board’s 2008 state summary of the Indiana PSAT.

However, there is still a large gap between the number of students whose PSAT scores qualify them for AP courses and the number of students who actually take AP classes and exams, according to the College Board.

While many reasons contribute to this gap, the main issue is “a lack of information,” said Carroll Easterday, senior educational manager at the College Board’s Indiana office.

“There’s a lack of information that gets to the students, and it’s certainly not that counselors do not share it,” Easterday said. “Sometimes there just needs to be more information.”

Recently, the Department of Education has implemented a new AP program as a way to get more information to students who are interested in AP courses, said John Gubera, the advanced placement director at the Department of Education.

“We want to have someone who is very interested in AP growth in school to be onsite at every school,” Gubera said. “We would relay all available AP information directly to that person.”

The College Board has also issued a tool called AP Potential that analyzes students’ PSAT scores to help identify potential AP students, according to the College Board.

“The College Board has conducted studies over a period of time to see if there is a correlation between AP exam results and PSAT scores,”  Easterday said. “There is a pretty significant relationship between PSAT scores and a student’s potential for doing well in AP courses.”

AP Potential, along with the increased number of sophomores taking the PSAT today, will greatly aid in increasing the number of students who participate in AP classes, Gubera said.

“This tool helps find students who qualify for AP classes that may not have been found before,” Gubera said.

By law, every Indiana high school is supposed to offer at least two AP courses, Gubera said.

But this is not the case.

“Schools tend to say that students do not have enough interest and they don’t have enough kids to fill that class,” Gubera said.

However, with the 33 percent increase of students taking the PSAT this year and the available AP tools now being utilized, Gubera is not deterred.

“Our stance is that the AP is not just for the advanced or elite kids,” Gubera said. “It’s for the prepared student.”