The robot knows the dangers of this exercise, and you should, too.

AP Biology Data Diving

More reasons why I’m not concerned with the AP Exam.

I teach AP Biology. I do not care at all about the AP Exam. These things have been true for as long as I can remember. Maybe I cared during my first few years, when I thought that the exam would tell me something useful about my classes. And I guess if I ever saw significant shifts in exam scores, that might be useful. But that never happens. In two decades of teaching this course, the only thing that has ever had a significant impact on how my students do on it has been moving from a public school to a private one. And retrospectively, I don’t actually know what would have been a useful takeaway from exam scores early on in my career¹.

But it’s data, and as such it seemed like a thing to use to kick the tires on some LLM-assisted data analysis this past week.

Why did I do this?

Before I get what I did, I want to interrogate why I felt like doing this. Given what I’ve written above, you would be excused for thinking that spending any of my time looking at this data puts a bit of a lie to my stated distaste for acting like the AP exam means anything useful for my class. If I “don’t care at all” about it, why am I giving it any time? Here are my three reasons:

1. I have always suspected that doing well on the…