Berkeley High School Advanced Math and Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus AB teacher Benjamin Nathan estimated that 10 percent of Calculus AB students and 15-35 percent of Advanced Math 2 students dropped each class respectively. BHS administration declined to confirm these numbers by the time of publication. BHS senior Vishvanath Sriram estimated, “In the current AP Mandarin class, there were maybe 10 out of the 30 students I recognized for Mandarin 1 when I was a freshman.”
Students, teachers, and counselors alike attributed high drop rates to college pressure. “There's a very pervasive, stressful academic culture,” said Addison Fonseca, a Berkeley International High School (BIHS) counselor. According to Fonseca, BHS students often bite off more than they can chew in terms of difficult classes. Because of this, many students sign up for more advanced courses than they can handle, and drop them at the beginning of the school year, Fonseca explained.
Nathan explained that students can sometimes feel like they are “supposed to be” in advanced classes because of internal and external pressures. Sriram reflected a similar sentiment, explaining that there is an immense pressure to be a perfect student in his AP language class.
Sriram said that this expectation can lead to a vicious cycle of frustration and worse outcomes. “When you know you can't do (the work), you just start to take it less seriously and then that makes your grade even worse,” he said. Sriram dropped AP Mandarin and AP Biology within the first couple weeks of the school year due to their difficulty.
Another reason for class drops is gender disparity, especially in AP science classes, according to BHS senior Bria Matubrew. Indeed, boys tend to dominate AP classes in STEM: for instance, female students only made up 35 percent of AP Physics students in California, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
BHS senior Eve Eyal believes this imbalance creates a cycle of increased pressure on female students for better performance, raising the standards and causing even more to drop challenging courses. “I find that it puts pressure on me to get things right, so I can kind of prove that girls can get the problems right, so it does add some more pressure to the class,” Eyal said.
Matubrew explained that male dominance in STEM careers can also cause girls to shy away from taking STEM classes. “The field of engineering is already very male heavy, so I think that some girls might be just apprehensive of pursuing that career as a whole,” she said. She added that this could make female students more reluctant to take engineering-oriented classes like AP Physics.
Another reason for dropping classes could be a lack of resources to support students in more difficult courses. Kai Mosavat, a BHS senior said. Because of BHS’ large size, some students may not receive the amount of resources or support they need to fulfill their full academic potential. This was the case for BHS senior Neko Ikels, who dropped out of Advanced Math 2. She expressed a desire for more resources to help Advanced Math students because there were only two Advanced Math tutors at the College and Career Center who were often busy, or unable to help due to limited understanding of the math problems, according to Ikels.
“There's an entire group of people in public schools that are having opportunities taken away from them,” Mosavat said. He believes this is due to the underfunding of public schools and said that it is leading to a system of inequalities where public school students do not have the same academic support as private school students.
According to BHS Vice Principal Keldon Clegg, many students drop classes because the course requires more work than they are willing to complete. He explained that the pressure of impressing colleges has led students to believe that an A is the only acceptable grade. “What they're actually saying is I don't want to get a grade less than an A,” he said. Oftentimes it is not logistically possible for students to switch classes, so students must commit to doing what they can in the classes they previously chose. He suggested the school provide further resources to help students remain in these challenging classes.
Some teachers and counselors, however, are pushing for students to avoid even signing up for APs in the first place. Addison Fonseca, BHS counselor, said that the counselors have been discouraging students from picking too many APs during course selection to prevent burnout, but that the message is difficult to get across because of pressure on students to optimize their transcripts for college. Still, Fonseca strongly advised students to devalue colleges’ perceptions of their resumes. She explained that colleges don’t value academics in the way that students believe, such as an extremely high number of AP classes.
Beyond student impacts, class drops can also cause issues for the district as a whole, Clegg explained. Class drops can create major issues in scheduling, also leading to budget issues, he continued. Classes are planned on the district budget, so BHS doesn’t have the ability to create new classes mid-year, meaning there may be no periods for students to switch into if they drop classes. Clegg wants to ease the stress on the system by potentially changing the bell schedule to accommodate time for talking to counselors as well as other potential bell schedule changes. Clegg added that he is looking at potentially implementing changes to the master schedule, in hopes of reducing dropped classes. “When you're dropping a course, usually it means you're taking another version of it. Well, why do we have so many versions of the same thing?” Clegg said. He wants to create fewer options for students by decreasing the amount of versions of classes in one subject. Even without these specific changes, BHS has had a decrease in class drops over the last couple of years according to Clegg.
Another modification was shifting the course selection system from Infinite Campus over to Google Forms. In the new system, students can only see courses that are actually available to them, based on their grade and small school. This saves the counselors some tedious work, because they no longer have to manually revise impossible student course selections. According to Clegg, the decreased caseload allows the counselors more time to speak with students. BHS staff continue to work hard helping students select courses that interest them, at an appropriate difficulty level. And once enrolled, many are working with students to find solutions to stay in their classes and take advantage of the resources BHS provides.