America's College Board Launches AP Cybersecurity Course For Non-College-Bound Students

Besides administering standardized pre-college tests, America's nonprofit College Board designs college-level classes that high school students can take. But now they're also crafting courses "not just with higher education at the table, but industry partners such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the technology giant IBM," reports Education Week.

"The organization hopes the effort will make high school content more meaningful to students by connecting it to in-demand job skills." It believes the approach may entice a new kind of AP student: those who may not be immediately college-bound.... The first two classes developed through this career-driven model — dubbed AP Career Kickstart — focus on cybersecurity and business principles/personal finance, two fast-growing areas in the workforce." Students who enroll in the courses and excel on a capstone assessment could earn college credit in high school, just as they have for years with traditional AP courses in subjects like chemistry and literature. However, the College Board also believes that students could use success in the courses as a selling point with potential employers... Both the business and cybersecurity courses could also help fulfill state high school graduation requirements for computer science education...

The cybersecurity course is being piloted in 200 schools this school year and is expected to expand to 800 schools next school year... [T]he College Board is planning to invest heavily in training K-12 teachers to lead the cybersecurity course.
IBM's director of technology, data and AI called the effort "a really good way for corporations and companies to help shape the curriculum and the future workforce" while "letting them know what we're looking for." In the article the associate superintendent for teaching at a Chicago-area high school district calls the College Board's move a clear signal that "career-focused learning is rigorous, it's valuable, and it deserves the same recognition as traditional academic pathways."

Also interesting is why the College Board says they're doing it: The effort may also help the College Board — founded more than a century ago — maintain AP's prominence as artificial intelligence tools that can already ace nearly every existing AP test on an ever-greater share of job tasks once performed by humans. "High schools had a crisis of relevance far before AI," David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, said in a wide-ranging interview with EdWeek last month. "How do we make high school relevant, engaging, and purposeful? Bluntly, it takes [the] next generation of coursework. We are reconsidering the kinds of courses we offer...."

"It's not a pivot because it's not to the exclusion of higher ed," Coleman said. "What we are doing is giving employers an equal voice."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

I like the idea on the surface...

[sarren1901]

though I would definitely like to see an outline or syllabus for the cybersecurity class. Without a primer class or two, this will go over their heads or be so watered down as to be useless. Possibly something like blending a network+ and security+ class together would be something to consider. You could keep it vendor neutral or in this case it's IBM, so whatever certificates they offer.

Yeah, they are just pieces of paper but sometimes those get you the interview and then you get yourself the job. If the k

Re: I like the idea on the surface...

[sixminuteabs]

Thank you for agreeing we should pay good teachers very very well

Re:

[sarren1901]

I've always liked school and learned a lot of things from my various teachers. We should be paying teachers enough to want to attract people that would like to teach but make much more in the private sector. Raise teacher pay and those people would be teaching instead.

I don't know how you fix the mess public education is. I don't have a child, so my only experience with K-12 is what I myself did decades ago. I hear things have changed. My sister is a teacher and she's told me some. Between her and what I re

lmao

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it's going to be watered down nonsense. There are exactly two college-level AP curricula, Physics C and Calculus BC. None of the other AP courses teach one year of a college course in one year of high school. (Arguably the two economics courses, together, constitute a year of college-level course, but you get two AP credits for the pair.) There are certainly others that use college-level textbooks (e.g. statistics, biology) but they spread out one term's material over a whole year, hence not colle

Great

[alvinrod]

I'm sure this will be as successful as CS in the Classroom and any other number of pie-eyed initiatives.

If you wanted to teach high schoolers cybersecurity then the class should involve never sending anyone pictures of your genitals, posting any that could be associated with your real name, and never trusting a damned thing you read on the internet. Anything less than that is failing to equip them to deal with the modern world.

Re:

[BladeMelbourne]

Alvin (hi!) - I don't trust anything you wrote in your comment. Now excuse me please whilst I resume sending people pictures of my genitals.

Do employers care about AP?

[larryjoe]

Given that there are many cybersecurity certifications available from different well-regarded organizations, why would any employer care about an AP course? A job candidate that didn't go to college wouldn't gain even a little bit of an advantage with an AP CS course, so why would an AP cybersecurity course have any value in helping to get a job?

Re:

[alvinrod]

Because it's new and not everyone is aware of it yet. That means some poor dumb bastard can acquire these credentials to land a cushy job which was constructed to require them. The course will be useless, but the right sort of useless people will take it in order to be hired for some position which grants them a certain salary.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That seems like a fairly niche application. Sure, all kinds of hiring outcomes are possible if daddy is on the board or whatnot and this wouldn't be markedly less adequate than other plausible-enough excuses; but, barring some sort of strong reason for them to try to shove you into the job, 'AP course' is already well known to mean "not college level experience but your high school had easier ways of passing" which is pretty marginally prestigious.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Do people take AP courses without any intention of going to college?

Stick to the Basics

[Oddroot]

Teach kids to read, teach them enough US history and economics to be able to understand their taxes and teach them sufficient math to be able to handle real-life situations that call for it, and call it a day.

There are school districts all over the US, large, well funded ones, who have zero or almost zero students testing at rhe proficient level in English and Math. Until those numbers are 80% or over, fuck much of anything else, they are failing in the only things that matter.

We have some obsession with high school in the US being some kind of baby-college, but 90% or more of what they teach will be forgotten in the first year or two after graduation as it relates to so little in adult life.

Re: Stick to the Basics

[RightwingNutjob]

Time was they did teach classes for going into the workforce and not just looking good on a college application.

The middle school I want to outside of Philadelphia in the 90s used to be the high school building in the 50s and 60s. Deep down in the basement was an honest to God wood shop with drill presses and band saws and everything. In the mid 90s they used that space to teach middleschoolers some pseudo STEM class once a week that amounted to playing with legos and putting together CO2 cartridge racecars

Re:

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

I'm surprised you're forgetting the real reason why, so I'll give you a quote from TFA as a reminder:

"a really good way for corporations and companies to help shape the curriculum and the future workforce"

The phenomenon you describe happened for exactly the same reason - the business managers 20 or 30 years ago deciding to "shape the future workforce". At the time, the rightwing nutjobs were convinced that they have "won the Cold war", that the "history had ended" and that it was okay to dump all manufacturing to China and live off "services", which in a few years morphed into living off selling ads on the in

Not really about AI

[JoshuaZ]

This isn't really about AI. Even before the rise of the new AI systems, a lot of elite schools were dropping AP classes. Choate was one of the first https://mthmountain.com/2017/03/24/school-abandons-ap-curriculum/ [mthmountain.com] but now a lot have done so. Their reasons for it are complicated, but it is spreading to more schools. The upshot is that the College Board, as a business, needs to offer other products to stay relevant. This is in keeping with that need.

Do colleges even care?

[zkiwi34]

They probably won't. They're more often than not caring less about either current AP CS courses.

The College Board is a Leach

[TheMiddleRoad]

They have slithered their way into being a necessary part of any high school transcript and college application. Not willing to pay for all those AP exams? Don't have the SAT and several AP scores? You're not getting into a decent school. Sorry, bro. Then they have their own version of FAFSA, to get another 100 bucks or so out of people.

Do they provide anything of value? Fuck no. Their curriculum guides are utter shit.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I teach AP CS Principles, AP CS A, and AP Calculus BC at a very good independent school.

AP CS Principles is maybe 60% of a first programming class, if taught right. It can also be taught using drag and drop coding. It is NOT a college level course.

AP CS A covers most of what is taught in a good first college programming class, using Java. Except input. Yeah... it doesn't include input. Perhaps it's just me, but I always believed the basics of coding were: input, processing, output. Leaving off

Re:

[bussdriver]

I tested out of Calc 1 & 2 with an early AP class in Calc when it was new. I may have passed the tests and was perfect in ACT math but the college calc I took anyway was not easy and felt almost like another class. They were teaching future engineers while high school was teaching only to pass the tests used to let you skip the college class that some schools had (AP being the major one.)

They should not allow anybody to test out of Calc. If you know it, you can easily pass the class in college; stop le

Maybe it is just me, But?

[oldgraybeard]

a College Advance Placement course for Non-College-Bound Students?
Wow, the individuals running schools just keep getting dumber. Next thing you know they will stop teaching reading and math.

Re:

[Morpeth]

You are confusing The College Board for actual universities and colleges.

The College Board is a non-profit (questionable) that administers APs, ACTS, PSAT, SAT -- they don't run ANY schools nor define college/univ curriculum

College Board getting desperate to stay relevant

[Morpeth]

As more and more schools, including elite private schools which are often Ivy feeders -- drop AP courses from their curriculum, The College Board is just trying to stay relevant and justify its existence and keep revenue streams.

They've been adding more non-college level course to their AP curriculum, which is odd since they whole point of Advanced Placement originally was to offer courses supposedly equal to 1/2 or maybe 1 year college level 100 courses typically.

I'm a teacher with 20 years in industry pr

What is AP Cybersecurity? - Honestly!

[Murdoch5]

I write, and review, a lot of cybersecurity documentation, I just wrote a cybersecurity essentials course for a company. AP would be Advanced Prep, so apart from the normal advice, which grossly summarized:

0. Password Hygiene and MFA basics.
1. Don't download janky crap.
2. Don't click on things that popup.
3. Don't expose yourself publicly on Social Media.
4. Don't trust email (this is a huge topic).
5. Understand how to detect when things are wrong.

What else would be covered:

6. Understanding licensi

Re:

[ole_timer]

AP = Advanced Placement, the idea being that you'd get college credit for AP courses taken in high school, has little or no bearing on job prospects

Re:

[Murdoch5]

I know, my point is what would it cover at a meaningful level?

Re:

[ole_timer]

introductory at best, but you have to start somewhere... Charles DeGaul's gardener once reportedly said that planting a tree would take 100 years to fully mature, DeGaul apparently responded "then plant it now!"