You’d be forgiven for missing the recent updates to the AP Chemistry Course and Exam Description (CED). As usual, the College Board’s communication is left wanting, but a couple of months ago that’s exactly what they did – updated the CED. You can read about all of the changes here, and here’s a very quick summary of my thoughts on the matter.

There is really no material change to anything – nothing at all in terms of what you should be teaching or doing, so we could stop discussing this right here, but there a few pretty really interesting notes that go alongside these ‘tweaks’.

Let’s start with the total removal of the Big Ideas (and indeed the Enduring Understandings). Both of these edubabble, educational theory bullshit ideas were doomed from day 1. I wrote this almost 9 YEARS AGO – 9 years ago! Then I wrote this in 2019 when they started to phase them out. The fact that they ever existed at all, and that it took the College Board until now to remove them, tells you pretty much all you need to know about the gulf that exists between the people that do educational ‘research’, and those of us that do the ACTUAL work. Such guff should never have been introduced to any discussion of teaching AP chemistry ever, let alone into a practical document designed to help teachers, teach, rather those ideas should have stayed in the Schools of Education – where NO ONE teaches – where they belong. Good riddance.

Now let’s go on to have a look at a conversation that I have with Jamie Benigna OVER FOUR YEARS AGO. The labeling of 5.9 as “Steady State Approximation” in the earlier version of the CED was plain wrong. He, and the CB knew this years ago, and again it took until May of 2024 to get this corrected. To allow this to stand in such a document for that long is unacceptable IMO.

Updates to “Skills” are of course, 100% irrelevant, because there isn’t an AP Chemistry teacher on the planet, who knows what he or she is doing, that would refer to them or worry about them at ALL during the delivery of a course.

The re-arrangement of the Equation and Constants sheet, including the addition of the equation for Coulomb’s law, is no more than the College Board reacting to a request from teachers that’s been around for as long as the new CED came out in 2013. With the utter obsession with Coulomb’s law that the CB has embraced, how could it take this long? Weird, just weird.

Finally, when you look at the way that the College Board have changed some of the names of the UNITS and TOPICS you see that I (and many other AP teachers) have been using other names that made more sense from day one. All I end up asking myself is how did the CB get so much of this so wrong from the beginning? In this video Benigna says that these changes were made after, “we got feedback from teachers that some of the unit and title topics could be improved”. This is laughable. They were all wrong from the beginning, and teachers knew it immediately as evidenced by the posts and comments that I and others made years ago in so many cases. The incompetence is simultaneously staggering and totally predictable.

Most of this stuff really doesn’t matter at ALL. Shuffling TOPICS from one UNIT to another is really of no consequence whatsoever since there is no obligation to teach the content in any particular order. Re-naming things, whilst a good idea, doesn’t make any material difference to people that are teaching the course. What does matter is the fact that it took multiple years to correct the two things that were important, i.e., the name of 5.9 and the addition of Coulomb’s Law to the Equations & Constants sheet.