Test 2

Sometimes parents just don’t know when to let go, but it’s rare when a judge needs to intervene.

That was the case for Aubrey Ireland, a 21-year-old music theater major at College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. She convinced a judge to grant her a restraining order against her parents, David and Julie Ireland.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Ireland told the court that despite making the dean’s list, her parents would routinely drive 600 miles from Kansas to Ohio to make unannounced visits to her at school. Then they accused her of illegal drug use, promiscuity and mental illness.

Her parents allegedly became so overbearing that they installed keylogging software on her computer and cell phone to keep track of her every move. She told the court, “I was a dog with a collar on.”

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the school hired security guards to keep them out of their daughter’s performances in school productions. When she cut off all contact with them, her parents responded by stopping payment on tuition checks.

Both the school and the court have sided with Aubrey. The University of Cincinnati gave her a full scholarship for her senior year, and the judge issued a civil stalking order against her parents, ordering them to stay at least 500 feet away from her and have no contact with her until September 2013.

High school students hoping to earn college credits through Advanced Placement exams soon will be out of luck at Dartmouth College, which has concluded the tests aren’t as rigorous as its own classes.

The Ivy League school currently awards credit in some academic subjects for qualifying scores on Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and A-level exams. But after nearly a decade of discussion, faculty recently voted to end the practice starting with the class of 2018.

“The concern that we have is that increasingly, AP has been seen as equivalent to a college-level course, and it really isn’t, in our opinion,” said Hakan Tell, a classics professor and chairman of the college’s Committee on Instruction.

Dartmouth’s decision comes at a time of rapid growth for Advanced Placement. Some 2 million students took 3.7 million AP tests last spring, figures that have more than doubled in the last decade. In 2011, 18 percent of U.S. high school graduates passed at least one AP exams (by scoring at least a 3 on a scale of 1 to 5), up from 11 percent a decade ago.

But the program also has faced criticism that its growing popularity has resulted in watered down courses.

“Many high schools have made their AP courses little more than test prep,” said Bob Schaeffer, of FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing. “The common criticism is that they’re a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep.”

Dartmouth also still believes AP courses are useful in preparing students for college and will continue to use test scores to help place students in appropriate courses, Tell emphasized, and students who may have wanted to use AP credit to graduate early will have other options. But he pointed to an experiment undertaken by the college’s psychology department as proof that AP courses often fall short.

Rather than award credit for an introductory course to incoming students who got the highest score on the AP test, the department gave those students a condensed version of the Dartmouth course’s final exam. Ninety percent failed, Tell said. And when those students went on to take the introductory class, they performed no better than those who did not have the high AP test scores.

After a couple of admissions cycles, some will move on to something else, while others will get sucked into the higher education industry for the rest of their careers.

“A co-worker of mine once described admissions as a two-or-20 job, meaning you’re either in it for two years or 20 years,” said Matthew Kaberline, who used to work in UMW admissions and recently became the associate director of college counseling at the Severn School in Maryland. “There didn’t seem to be an in between.”

The centerpiece of the job is “travel season,” which runs from September to early November. Recruiters hit the suburbs with color-coded calendars and global positioning systems loaded with high school addresses. They rack up loyalty program points at mid-tier hotels, log thousands of miles on rental cars and learn how to hide booze on their expense reports.

Between appointments, they wander through shopping malls, search for a Panera with WiFi or dream about how they will someday blow all of these loyalty points on a major vacation. Many of these road warriors become friends. Some drunkenly hook up. A few fall in love.

But the lifestyle can be exhausting. The pay can be painfully low. And it can be frustrating for some recruiters, who are figuring out their lives, to deal with high school students who are doing the same thing.