By Nathalie Levine
During the first two weeks of May, the old gymnasium and the library loft are off-limits to the general population of Princeton High School. Signs taped on doors and nearby walls proclaim “POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE!” Guidance counselors struggle to carry large stacks of plastic-wrapped booklets, freshly sharpened pencils, and water bottles while certain students—an elite, gullible, fortunate, smart, or stupid group, depending on your perspective—take their assigned places at long tables inside.
This is the scene during AP season at PHS, which offered 22 AP classes this year and more than that many AP exams during the two-week national exam period. Hundreds of students take advantage of the AP program every year. But the courses and tests are perennially controversial in many respects, such as their cost, their purpose, and their effectiveness. Conversations with PHS students who are familiar with the way APs work here have revealed complicated and widely differing opinions about the system.
The website of the College Board, the organization behind the AP (Advanced Placement) program, calls it “a unique learning experience that will help you succeed in college.”
“Students…who want to learn and achieve at the highest level become AP students,” the website reads. “…You can earn college credit and advanced placement, stand out in the admissions process, and learn from some of the most skilled, dedicated, and inspiring teachers in the world.”
This is the sales pitch in a nutshell, and PHS students tend to take AP courses for exactly these reasons. Chelsea Persons and Saumitra Sahi, PHS class of 2009, can vouch for the first reason: that taking AP classes in high school will help students do well in college.
With the AP credit that Persons earned by taking AP English and history in high school, she was able to skip two required classes this year at the University of Maryland and use the time to take classes in her two majors.
Sahi, now a freshman at Princeton University, was also able to place out of some requirements during his first year in college. “I’m not sure if it made my college experience easier,” said Sahi. “It probably made it harder because the APs molded me into a student who constantly tries to challenge himself.” But for students who love learning, this is one definition of academic success.
While earning college credit may be the most tangible and direct benefit of taking APs, many different factors motivate most PHS students to take them. Some students admit that they think AP classes will look good on a transcript when they apply to college. The fact that the exam, and therefore the curriculum, is uniform across the country means that admissions officers may use the courses and exams to compare students from very different backgrounds.
PHS students seem more intense than students at many other high schools when it comes to the number of APs taken, noticed junior Emefa Agawu. “Here it is certainly not unusual for a junior to take three or four APs, whereas some of my friends in Massachusetts are astounded by this statistic,” she said.
“At every college I’ve visited, the director of admissions has said something along the
lines of, ‘We like to see that students have taken the most challenging courses offered at their high schools,’” said Rose Fowler Lapp, a junior. “For a school like PHS, that’s a pretty tall order.” To take “the most challenging courses” here is to pack your schedule with APs.
“That’s what colleges want, and you need to do that to get into a good college,” said Sasha Chhabra, a sophomore, voicing a major concern of many of the students who choose to take APs. But there are social pressures, too, that motivate students to take AP classes.
“If I don’t go AP, I’d feel left out of my loop of friends,” said Allison Chen, a junior who has taken five APs so far. A senior who wished to remain anonymous because of privacy concerns went farther, describing “a hushed atmosphere of superiority and inferiority with APs: kids who take them are made to feel superior, and kids who choose not to… are made to feel inferior.”
Yet another reason to take APs is the personal desire for an intellectual challenge. “I take difficult classes and take exams…for the internal reward,” said Jake Golden, a senior. Most students who have taken some of the famously difficult AP classes at PHS, of which AP English III and AP U.S. History are particularly notorious, agree that they are much harder and at a totally different level than the regular classes they took before.
AP classes can be even more demanding than college classes, according to many college students who took APs in high school. “It’s like…you can almost relax in college,” Shannon Dean, a PHS junior, said friends now in college have told her.
“It takes a toll on you,” sophomore Sarah Cen said about the large number of AP classes some students take. “It often wears me out.”
But many students agree that the grind is worth it for what they learn. Michael Prentky, who will be attending the New England Conservatory next year, took the AP Music Theory course last year and loved it. Just as fewer people attend music schools than attend liberal arts universities or colleges, such specialized AP classes are not as widely offered as AP options in English or science.
“How many kids can say their high school offers AP Art History or AP Mandarin?” asked Dean, who plans to take the art history course next year. APs in areas like these offer students who are deeply interested in the subject a chance to study it at a high level, so students are much more likely to be engaged in the material than students in regular classes.
But many students criticize the AP system for selling what they see as test-prep courses as college-level classes. An AP class might be harder than its counterpart in college simply because it meets and has homework due every day, and because high school students are concurrently taking up to seven other classes, while college students rarely take more than five courses a semester. But this doesn’t mean that the thinking is any more in-depth or that the teaching is any better. “[The College Board] tests mostly if we’ve gone through all of the material and not necessarily if we understand it,” said Chen.
While the exams might not be the best way to judge what students have learned, they remain an essential part of AP courses, for better or for worse. “I’ve definitely seen this year that ‘teaching to the test’ has really taken a toll on my actually learning anything,” said Dillon Reisman, a senior. He said he felt that if a teacher spent a lot of class time preparing students to take the test, and then he didn’t take it, his time in the course had been wasted.
A lot of it does have to do with the instructor. “With the right teacher, the AP class will feel more like a class and less like a cram session for the exam. However, sometimes, the class only involves rushing and concern for the exam, which I feel defeats the purpose of learning,” said Chen.
Sophomore Lucy Fleming had a slightly different take. “It’s true that in [non-AP] courses the teachers have more leeway” to design the curriculum and manage their own time, she said. “But if a course is advertised as AP, the teacher should at least make an effort to prepare students [for the exam].”
Dean had a different perspective. “I feel like PHS tends to reserve a lot of the best teachers in a given subject for the AP classes, or maybe I’ve just been lucky,” she said. For all of the complaints students have about their AP load, especially around early May, they agree for the most part that taking the classes has enriched them.
The value of an AP comes from your reason for taking it, said Fowler Lapp, who has taken four AP classes and five exams so far. “If it’s in a subject you’re not interested in, then what you get out of the course is a better-looking transcript…. But if the class is in a subject you do care about, then you’ll get a lot more out of it. I’ve come out of each [AP] class feeling that my time there was well spent.”
