By Shanti Hossain
The Old Gym at Princeton High School is lined with rows upon rows of long wooden desks right now. So much of the school’s attention is on what’s going on in that gym right now: a good portion of the Guidance Department is there at any given time as proctors; many classes are moving a bit slower right now, knowing that every day there will be at least a few absences; our daily announcements have been stopped to ensure quiet in the gym. This week and next week, we have our AP exams.
AP, or Advanced Placement, exams are the culmination of a year’s work in AP classes, which seek to mimic college-level courses in scope and intensity. On his Twitter, Principal Snyder noted that our school is administering over 1,500 AP exams. By the end of this two week period, that’ll be 1,500 scantrons and name plates placed on the tables in the Old Gym, 1,500 total absences from classes, with each exam spanning at least half the school day, and, in the end, 1,500 completed exams sealed and shipped back to the College Board for 1,500 scores sent back to us some time over the summer.
It was in sophomore year when I, and many of my classmates, took our first AP — AP United States History. A number of us look back on that AP fondly; we were terrified by it and all probably felt like we’d more or less failed right after finishing the test, but in the end we were proud of how our work, the most work and studying most of us had put into a class up to that point, had paid off.
After the novelty of that first AP, though, they quickly lost their charm. Junior year is the peak of most students’ AP career, with a lot of us struggling to balance studying for more than one lengthy exam and keeping our composure through the process. More than one of these exams is hard to get through and feel like you’re adequately prepared; a few students take as many as 7 or 8 of them, some of which they’ve likely studied for on their own while alongside the work of their actual AP courses. I wasn’t quite at that extreme, taking 4 AP exams last year myself.
Even with that “average” AP load, I remember it as an incredibly stressful time. Each day, I looked over a study schedule I’d made and worried about how dreadfully far behind I’d fallen, simply because there was too much I wanted to review, too much I feared would appear on the test that I wouldn’t have mastered. I took a few days off of school to study; it was a common practice in those two weeks, the day before a big exam used to cram as much as possible.
The motivation for those juniors: college. AP teachers pressed all their students to take the corresponding exam using a common pitch: AP exams could be used for college credits at many schools, justifying the test’s $90 cost. Students tended to think about it in another way, though; we thought about college applications and how, for the college admissions officers, a list of stellar AP scores might be enough to convince them of our merits.
Here in my last year of APs as a senior, I’m on the other side of that college process. Almost all seniors have chosen where they’re going to school by this point, and our AP testing atmosphere reflects that. This year, whether to take an AP test is more of a practical choice than an impressive endeavor; if your college doesn’t give credit or placement for a high AP score, it doesn’t make sense to pay the high cost of the exam, whereas others might be studying hard for the chance of more credit. A friend of mine, for example, expects to have earned 47 college credits towards his 120 credit degree from four years of AP testing in high school, allowing him to enter in the fall with standing as a second semester sophomore. By contrast, the college I’ll be attending doesn’t give any credit from AP test scores; one of my scores might allow me to place into higher level courses, and a handful of my other scores simply give me the privilege of taking the department’s placement exam.
From this perspective at the end of my AP career, the value of all those exams isn’t clear. It’s just so hard to know whether you’ll benefit from the system, an ambiguity the College Board surely appreciates and profits from. College credits and advanced standing are great, when you can get them. But the extreme stress of studying for these exams, fueled by that blind, sometimes fruitless hope that good scores will grant you acceptance into the best schools and prove valuable in the future, casts the process in a more negative light.
Shanti Hossain is a senior at Princeton High School.
