In 2022, Kingwood Park had 17 AP classes. Next year, there will be 13.
This is the final year for many AP classes students at Kingwood Park have taken for years, with AP Government, AP Economics, and AP Pre-Calculus no longer offered. There are a variety of reasons for the decline, but the main factors include a lack of student enrollment in the class and the shift to a different college credit bearing option.
“There’s not one set way in which an AP class is phased out. Sometimes, a trend in the data shows declining enrollment and as campus administrators begin looking at staffing, they may determine that an alternative course may better meet the needs for their campus,” Dr. Tong Utakrit, Director of Advanced Learning and Services for Humble ISD said.
Some of the most common college credit options replacing AP have been the University of Texas’ OnRamps, a dual enrollment program that, if passed with at least a D-, earns a student a semester of credit from the University of Texas. If the class is passed with a C, any public university in Texas is required by law to accept it, though out of state there are no such protections.
At Kingwood Park, Chemistry, Physics, and Biology have already transitioned from AP to OnRamps in years past, and the OnRamps Government and Economics courses will be the only advanced option besides dual credit over the summer for the classes.
Biology teacher Kristen Lynam, who has taught AP Biology at Kingwood Park since 2011 decided to ask the administration for a shift from AP to OnRamps after a trend of declining pass rates in recent years.
“With some of the kids in particular that I had that I knew were high achievers, working hard, and they didn’t earn the three, it kind of frustrated me because I knew if they were taking that class in college, they would have gotten credit for it,” Lynam said.
“Because I felt really, really bad for the kids that would sit through the whole class all year long, work really hard, did all the lab reports, and then made a two on the AP test, and so then they couldn’t use that to help them get into college. So when I brought the data to our administration and I said, there’s a group of kids that I think that we could get into this,” Lynam said.
Lynam saw some immediate differences in the class’ structure. While the day-to-day instruction in AP is individualized for every teacher, OnRamps has a more standardized model, where there are online quizzes and assignments that have to be done in a certain order and time frame as well as daily UT provided activities.
“It’s a lot less lecture, which is hard for me because I’m pretty much a lecture person,” Lynam said. “Like, that’s the kind of teacher I am. I like to teach it all and like, make sure kids understand it. So the hardest part for me has been like taking a step back from that teacher centered role and making it more student centered,”
But a student centered class has its own challenges. Lynam has seen an increase in the use of AI to complete classwork, which is easier to use on UT’s fully online learning model.
“I can have my classes on Go Guardian. And even though the kids are told like do not use Chat, do not use AI, I can watch kids just copy the question from the learning module, put it in to Google or put it into Chat and just get the answer. And so I can watch a kid complete a learning module in 3 minutes. They have all the answers. They may make a 90 or 100, but they don’t know any of the information,” Lynam said.
However, in terms of earned college credit, the pass rates have skyrocketed. With only a few weeks left in the course, 100% of students enrolled in OnRamps Biology are projected to be eligible for credit in the course.
“So you have to weigh what’s best for the campus, what’s best for Kingwood Park students. And that’s why we ultimately made the decision to go OnRamps,” Lynam said.
OnRamps was founded in 2011, and it has grown from a single Computer Science course to 18 dual credit courses. Because it is constantly updating and refining the curriculum, there have been some rocky points in the transition.
World Geography and new OnRamps Government teacher Jennifer Danielson experienced this firsthand as part of the first group of teachers to ever teach the class. Kingwood Park already had been offering the sister OnRamps Economics, which UT launched in the 2023-2024 school year.
“This is the first year this class is even a thing. OnRamps Government did not exist last year, UT just created it,” Danielson said. 
Her students referred to their class experience as the “guinea pig semester,” a moniker Danielson found accurate.
“I was contacting UT through the support multiple times to say you know this link or this assignment or whatever does not work or there were problems with the test. For example, like our first test, we were supposed to have 45 minutes and we ended up getting 20 to 25 minutes,” Danielson said. “It was just an issue. So I was constantly saying, ‘Hey, these are problems. What do we do about them?”
UT reevaluated some of their curriculum after the first semester.
“Over Christmas break, UT actually changed the class. And they restructured some things already,” Danielson said. “So they restructured the way the quizzes work. They restructured time. They restructured how many points the quizzes are worth. They restructured one of our assignments that was an in-class assignment and is now an at-home assignment.”
Despite changes in how the credit is earned, Kingwood Park has continued to grow in advanced credit options as a whole. Next year, AP Environmental Science is expected to be added as a class for juniors and seniors after a number of students expressed interest in the offering. Students also have the opportunity to take summer courses with San Jacinto or Lone Star Community College.
“AP, OnRamps and Dual Credit classes are all beneficial for our students and every campus reviews their data to determine what courses would best meet the needs of their students. If staffing allows, campuses try to offer all types of college credit bearing course options to their students,” Utakrit said.
