As cynical as I can be about the media, the sight of even a semi-serious debate over education reform does lift my spirits. Recently “The Atlantic” and NPR sparred over the benefits of Advanced Placement testing.

As with most debates on education, this one focused on the students. Does AP testing enhance student options? Does it improve the quality of education they receive? Do its merits warrant the cost? And so on.

I myself could practically be a poster child for the benefits of AP testing: Thanks to the credits I earned, I was able to shave a year off my degree, with all the reduced costs that it entails.

But with each passing semester I become less of a student, and more of an instructor. I spent this past weekend writing up what may well be the last homework assignment I ever do. So I could not help but read these debates while wondering what AP testing means for me as a teacher.

Education is not a zero-sum game, after all. Benefits for students do not have to come at the expense of teachers. So — if you will pardon my ego for a moment — what do I and my fellow teachers get out of AP testing now?

At the high school level, AP testing provides students with a positive external motivation. They see the benefits that await them in college — the opportunity to skip classes and get college credit not normally awarded for good grades; they can choose to take the AP course and work toward a high score on the test.

Even better, there is no real penalty for not doing well (outside of being out a few dollars for the test itself). AP testing is all carrot and no stick.

This matters because motivated students, especially those who are motivated to get a positive not just to avoid a negative, make some of the best students a teacher can have. They really do ask great questions. And because they already want to understand the material, their minds are primed and ready to learn.

All that book-learning, as it were, has a better reason to stick.

Teaching students who do not want to learn or who do not even want to be in the classroom is one of the hardest (and most depressing) things a teacher can do. It takes a great deal more effort and repetition to keep them following the lecture.

But having motivated students is a benefit for instructors currently teaching AP courses. What about colleges themselves, after the AP tests have been taken? What benefit do we see?

That benefit comes from sorting.

By sorting, I mean how we determine which students should go in which classes.

When you are done with this article, dear reader, I encourage you to visit YouTube and watch the animated RSA talk on “Changing Education Paradigms.” The speaker Sir Ken Robinson makes a comparison between standard educational systems and factory lines, wondering why we treat elementary school students as though their most important feature is their “date of manufacture.”

Age is just one way of sorting students; we also have preferred method of study, field of study, example-driven versus theoretical, those who prefer group work over independent study and vice-versa, and — what AP tests tell us — general aptitude in a field.

The importance of sorting is best felt in its absence. Have you ever sat in a large lecture hall packed with hundreds of students and felt as though the day’s topic was whizzing right over your head, even as half the class was nodding in understanding? Likely the instructor was trying to appeal to a particular demographic of students. He may have caught them and missed the rest.

When sorting is done particularly poorly, instructors are forced to either make their classes so generic that everyone gets some paltry, minimal amount of engagement, or else fall into the miss-half-the-class-half-the-time category mentioned above.

Figuring out the best method can be a true nightmare for instructors. I have heard exasperated hour-long debates that focused solely on how to handle those students who never even show up to lecture.

Being able to handle the multitude of students who do show up to class is one thing that separates great teachers from the merely good.

The AP tests and their scoring mechanism give us a great way to sort students by their skill in a given area. Those who got a 5 can move on to more difficult material. Those who got a 3 might retake an accelerated version of the course: They have seen the material once and just need to brush up on it some more. Since the AP tests are standardized, there is no ambiguity as to what a given score means, unlike typical transcript grades. I can look at a student’s score in Alaska and know that it means the same thing as a student’s score in Florida.

This makes teaching a far less daunting task, since it allows teachers to tailor the class directly to the students’ skill.

And that is the sort of good-for-teachers educational system I can really get behind.

Joseph is a graduate student in mathematics. He can be reached at [email protected].