Across the United States from May 2-14, hundreds of thousands of anxious students waited to take some of the most important standardized tests of the year – the Advanced Placement exams.
Advanced Placement (AP) courses provide students with opportunities to show colleges what they know and possibly receive credit for those classes. This ultimately leads to the possibility of skipping introductory college courses.
College Board is the organization that makes many of the standardized tests that are required to get into college, including the SATs and the APs. Out of the 37 AP tests the College Board creates, Old Rochester offers 13 from a wide range of subjects – U.S. history to calculus, literature to biology.
Most tests are two to three hours long, usually with a multiple choice section at the beginning of the test, followed by some kind of writing questions (there are a few exceptions to this setup, of course). Two tests were offered per day, one in the morning at 8:00 am, and the other at noon; so, if a student were to take more than one AP, they would (most likely) take their tests on different days, so there is little to no crossover.
Students are set to receive their scores this July.
Having the entire school year boil down to a single test can be daunting for high schoolers. So what makes them take the courses in the first place? For many, it is pressure and societal expectations that lead them to take the most stressful class. But luckily, for a large number of students, they take AP due to a genuine interest in the topic, as explained by Celeste Hartley.
“I chose AP Psych because I’m really interested in the human psychology, and I thought that choosing AP would help me look into that in extreme depth because I know that most classes touch upon certain areas,” Hartley said. “But I feel like in an AP class we would go really in depth, and if I wanted to choose that as a career, having the AP credits would further that.”
Students also seemed to come to a general consensus that the most difficult parts of an AP course were learning to manage your time and trying to prepare to retain as much information as possible in order to memorize it for those all-important three hours. Jonathan Kvilhaug explained, “The most difficult part of an AP class is the preparation and the extensive amount of work. But on the test itself, the worst part is getting ready for it … and it’s a very long test.”
As for standardized tests in general, most students believe they might not show colleges exactly what they’re made of. A junior who took one AP class and wished to remain anonymous said, “Overall, I feel it (standardized testing) doesn’t show who you are as a student, because they don’t see the other parts of you, and they’re just grading you for what everyone else sees you as…. They only see how well you test under pressure.”
Another junior, Mary Roussell, agreed. “I think that standardized testing is unfair, and it doesn’t really represent me as a student.”
Although most students seem to believe standardized testing is, at least, a little unfair, it is impossible not to point out the practical uses of a standardized test and how one can be beneficial, as pointed out by Kvilhaug.
“A lot of people will say that they don’t represent a full student,” said Kvilhaug, “but I think they do give a fair comparison between students, and it’s a good way to test people’s ability on that subject.”
For other students thinking about taking an AP course, senior Sydney Arruda gave some expert advice: “Make sure you study way in advance. Don’t cram.”
By Sienna Wurl