For any student in the US, AP’s have garnered quite a strong reputation for being college-level courses of great difficulty. Some upper formers brag often of their 4’s and 5’s, while others talk about sleepless nights and stressful preparation. Even online, talk of AP test has reached it’s apex every year during the AP testing season, as students country and even worldwide share in discussion. These topics range from discussing the AP topics to horror stories of test scores cancelled or cheating incidents. This year is the first time I take part in this hallowed American high school tradition.
I began taking AP tests a little later than many other students because my specific schools did not offer any AP level classes during the freshman year. Due to this, I only took my first set of AP tests a few weeks ago. However, even then, I had already heard of the infamous APs from my friends who attended different schools.
I took two tests this year: AP Calculus AB and AP Chinese. Contrary to much of the drama I had heard, my personal experience has been very tame. This especially as to do with how simple my AP tests were this year.
AP Calculus
AP Calculus AB offered a bit of a challenge as an overall decently difficulty. However, this is until you realize that the threshold for a 5 hovers at around 60-70% accuracy. This is a low grade which to me almost seemed like a joke. I had on occasion scored in the 80s on some of the worse tests which makes a C grade just seem very unlikely.
Despite this rationale, I still felt very nervous about taking the AP Calculus test, to the point that I studied constantly in the days leading up to this test. This test was scheduled for Monday the 12th so I essentially studied during all my free time on Sunday and Saturday, grinding through multiple practice MCQs and FRQs, reviewing cheat sheets, and cementing the many calculus topics to memory. Thinking back, this frenzied preparation is most unjustified as in terms of Calculus AB content and speaking generally, there is only the Limit laws, derivative laws, integral laws, and critical points and inflection points. However, this excessive preparation would come in very handy as after the test, while others were very nervous and worried, I felt overall very confident as there were only one or two questions during the entire test that I felt unsure of.
AP Chinese
A lot of my peers complain about me taking AP Chinese as a Chinese person, but I feel the exact opposite way. For a long time, I had felt unsure of my Chinese ability and had wanted to strengthen it, leading me to take Chinese for the past two years in my high school. Thus even if I had a slight edge with my background as I had a better intuitive understanding of Chinese, I still was learning just as much as each of my peers. It is also because of how unsecure I had been about my Chinese ability that I also became very worried for the Chinese AP.
The Chinese AP featured many different sections which include the Reading Section, the Listening Section, the Writing section, and the Cultural Presentation Section. Going into the test, I had doubts about each section.
For reading, I feared I would encounter characters, I didn’t know or take too long to decipher the passages and run out of time. For listening, I was afraid of hearing the question wrong or forgetting information. Because you were only allowed to listen to the recording a set amount of times, I could not easily check my understanding. For the Writing section, writing in a secondary language is just hard in general. Lastly, I was most afraid of the Cultural Presentation Section since I would need to speech quickly on a cultural topic with very little preparation time.
In the end, I feel that I did pretty well. During the reading section, I completed all the questions in 20 minutes and had ample time to check my work many times. For the listening section, I took notes during each voice recording. Though it is possible that I may have gotten something wrong, I feel quite confident. During the Writing section, the prompt was quite simple and I had a lot of time to do it. Finally, for the Cultural Presentation Section, I honestly feel that I did not perform as well as I could have. This is mainly due to the limited time I had in preparation and for speaking. Also, the test gave us two minutes to respond but no option to end the recording early. This meant that because I finished after a minute and 20 or so seconds, a lot of time was spent in silence which honestly just felt really awkward.
Conclusion
All in all, I feel very confident about each of my APs this year, and it was a generally good experience. What I learned was that these tests are not that hard if you prepare well enough due to how forgiving they are. While I may simply be cocky and fail miserably in a few months, I know in my heart of hearts that I had prepared well enough beforehand on my own and during my classes that this feeling of confidence isn’t simply a misguided illusion.
Moving on to next year, I will be taking five more APs than this year which is quite a sizeable increase in workload which I am not excited for. I hope you have enjoyed reading my ramblings. I simply found this to be an excellent form of closure for this stressful chapter of my academic journey. I wish you well from Pennsylvania and hope you have a good day.
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