Having celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2005, the Advanced Placement (AP) program has received quite a bit of attention in the past few years due mainly to its exponential growth in popularity. While much of this attention has been positive, a significant amount of criticism has attacked the assumptions of the AP program, aligning it with all other standardized tests. The AP program benefits the Educational Testing Service (ETS), making it millions of dollars each year. It benefits universities, allowing them to give away the equivalent of scholarships without spending a dime. It benefits parents, allowing their son or daughter to receive free college credit, shortening their time to a diploma. But what about student learning? What kind of skills are learned in a course that prepares students to take a test, and are those skills representative of those taught in a real college course? The author believes that these programs end up being detrimental to a student's education, as the program and exam do not accurately train and measure student writing ability, leaving students unprepared for college-level writing. Furthermore, the practice of testing out of first-year writing programs perpetuates the myth that these courses inculcate "basic skills" and should be skipped over by bright, self-motivated AP students, stereotyping these introductory writing courses as unimportant and worthless to "intelligent" students. In this article, the author examines the AP program and criticisms.