AP Business with Personal Finance | The AP Audit

Hey, Alex. It is great to see you again. A lot of things to talk about in the world of AP business with personal finance. The one I'm seeing on Facebook is everyone's asking about the AP audit. Can you give us a quick overview of what the AP audit is? Yeah. So the word audit might seem scary to people who are brand new to AP, right? But it's really not. It's really a way for College Board to ensure that you understand the expectations of the course and you're going They're going to be meeting all of the curricular requirements. Uh, when you go to plan and teach this course, getting your administrator, you and college board all on the same page with an approved, you know, program of study or a syllabus. So again, it's, it's designed to help you to make sure you're prepared to teach the class. Absolutely. And the most common thing is your syllabus might get rejected because it might be missing some specific curricular requirements. Sometimes that's just, you know, you didn't explain how you were going to be using case studies in the class, right? You listed your case studies, but you didn't explain how they would be used. And College Board just wants to see that they're properly embedded into the instruction, right? So they will be very explicit If you get rejected. I'll tell you, all the facilitators for APSIs this year, we actually, 100% of us got rejected. Don't let that scare you, because they specifically edited some requirements so we could go through the process of being rejected and making those changes. So it's okay. And, you know, they tell you exactly, I've seen the rejection feedback, they tell you exactly what you need to fix. So if you don't get approved the first time, don't freak out. Can you give teachers kind of a quick rundown of what does the audit process look like? My understanding is to start it off, you have to have your admin give you kind of approval to get you going. Yeah. So you probably have an admin who's in charge of AP or an AP coordinator who can help you out with that. Once you've done that hurdle, which they know all about, they do this all the time. You really want to make sure you've, if you haven't already, download the CED, the course and exam description. I tell people all the time, it's the Bible. of AP class. It tells you exactly what to do, how to do it, and how long you need to teach and assessment questions as well. Once you've downloaded the CED and you've got a really great understanding of everything that's in there, it's going to be time to write your syllabus. Syllabus is going to be the guiding document for your kids in your class and your own instruction. Once you've gotten your syllabus down, you should be selecting either a textbook that you're going to use or alternative digital resources that you'll use to meet that requirement. Once you do that, You'll hit the submit button on College Board's website, and you'll wait for College Board and your administrator's approval. It says, yes, you're ready to teach this course. One of the problems I'm sure a lot of teachers have is they're going to do an AP Summer Institute training over the summer, and they're thinking like, well, I don't want to write my audit until I go to the training, and what type of textbook should I get? What resources should I get? Submit it now, get it done, and then you can make the changes to what you're going to teach and how long you're going to spend time on later on. Is that correct? Yeah, it's fair. I know people are really anxious to get the audit done, right? We know when we make a syllabus that there's going to be some things change, right? Resources change, things change throughout the year. So that's totally okay. The core things are staying the same, right? The core things that you attest to, that you're using the case studies, how you're embedding them, right? That all is really going to stay the same. I will say at the APSI, you will have time there too, if you haven't done it, to work on your syllabus, to work on your course audit. So if you're seeing this a little bit later, Right before your APSI, like you've got a facilitator who will be able to help you with that. It's at the time we're recording this. Don't feel like you're behind, you know, you, you're, you're the people who are ahead right now, actually. Totally. Well, let's talk more about the textbook. There's a dropdown menu that says, here's the approved textbooks that are available. AP summer institutes. A lot of times publishers will give out a bunch of textbooks. You can kind of figure out which one works for you. It's great to have a lot of resources. One of the things that people have been throwing out is Pick maybe the OpenStax one now, if you're writing your syllabus, get that approved, the online OpenStax one, and then add some more supplement information. So OpenStax is one of the options you've got on that required textbook list. We're not affiliated with OpenStax or anything like that, but it is free and it's easily accessible. So it's an easy one you can get your hands on now and put it down for the course audit. When you go to an APSI, you're going to meet other publishers, see other resources, right? And you'll be able to, you know, pivot if you need to. To one of those resources. Perfect. Well, I want to mention a resource that is near and dear to my heart. The AP essentials textbook that I created for AP business with personal finance. This has all the key vocab overviews of all the units and then obviously a summary. And this includes daily lessons and slides. I also made activities and projects and some other resources, but we'll talk about those some other time. When we talk about textbook requirement textbook, isn't technically required for this course. You are able to use. Digital resources, and there's other, you know, a lot of other digital resources that you can try to get approved. I will say, as long as you have selected a textbook, which could include the one we had just mentioned, the OpenStax one, they won't ask you for what additional resources you are using. You'll only be required to get your additional resources approved if you're not using one of their pre-approved 13 textbooks on their list. The great thing is you're willing to give your syllabus out to teachers. So here is a QR code that can download your actual syllabus. So it's a syllabus that you should modify based off of your own needs. Thank you so much. So many teachers are going to benefit from that. So awesome, Alex. Thank you. Of course. Yeah, no worries. I know this is the second course audit that I've done for an AP class, and I know it seems scary. And hopefully just seeing the syllabus tells you, oh, I could do this myself. It's not that bad. But feel free to borrow from mine. You'll see in that syllabus, it meets all the curricular requirements and look at the examples of evidence that I give, right? If I have a textbook in there, for example, that you're not going to use, make sure you substitute that for your own textbook. If my pacing looks a little bit different than yours, like the order, because my school starts or ends at a different time than yours, then make sure you edit that, right? Well, thank you again, Alex, for meeting with me. We'll do more videos like this. We get more information from the College Board, talk about activities. And cool strategies. A huge thank you to you for giving us your syllabus. Super important. So many teachers are appreciative of that. They should definitely take a look at your professional developments over the summer. You're leading several AP summer institutes. You're awesome, Alex. High five. We'll see you later, dude. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.