Advanced Placement & College Preparedness

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>I am interested in gathering some information from Advanced Placement students who have already completed their college studies or have finished the first two years. I am trying to compile a list of answers to several questions so that I can provide the answers to parents who are looking at advanced academic studies at our high school. I want a variety of AP Programs from around the US and World so it doesn't look like our AP graduates are singing "Be True to Your School". Here are the questions:</p>

<p>1) Did AP help in college prep? What helped? Course Content? Writing skills? Study skills?</p>

<p>2) Did you receive college credit or advancement for your AP work? Did it help you to be advanced? Did the AP content cover what was expected by your college for the courses you were credited with?</p>

<p>3)Did you graduate from college? What school? Or if still in college what was your GPA after 4 semesters? </p>

<p>4)If you graduated from college, are you in a career related to your college degree?</p>

<p>5) In high school, did you have only AP or did your school offer other advanced academic programs? If so, which one did it offer? Did your school offer joint IB/AP courses?</p>

<p>6)How many AP tests did you take and which ones? What State or Country did you do your AP work?</p>

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<p>I took 13 APs (with mostly 5's) and my freshman GPA sucked ass.. in college, you are no longer filling in bubbles. You actually have to study for stuff..</p>

3

<p>1) AP only helped in that I was exposed to content that was NECESSARY for success in many courses. It was nice to pass out of some classes but also I think that the non-AP level at my school simply did not have enough content to prepare students for classes at top schools.</p>

<p>2) I received placement, not credit-- i.e. I didn't have to retake courses I had "taken" due to APs, but I didn't get credit towards graduation for any APs.</p>

<p>3) I'm a senior graduating in May at Brown University studying chemistry. I'll be continuing at Brown next year as a master's student in urban education policy.</p>

<p>4) I'll likely be combining my two degrees.</p>

<p>5) We had accelerated and honors level courses available in addition to AP courses. Many students had to take courses in the sciences twice because of NYS regents requirements.</p>

<p>6) New York, as stated earlier. 10 APs -- Biology, Physics B, Physics C, Chemistry, Calculus AB, Government, World History, United States History, Literature, and English Language.</p>

<p>Overall APs are a joke in terms of preparing you for the difficulty of college work, in my experience, but if that level of content wasn't available I would be even worse off. APs are just not hard enough and the exams are not designed like a typical college exam is (for practical reasons) and courses are not taught like college courses so the result is not anything near mimicry of college work.</p>

4

<p>Very heartily agree with modestmelody about the AP exams. The courses, however, can be very good if the teachers are motivated. </p>

<p>I am very much in favor for better AP exams to hopefully FORCE AP teachers to teach things certain ways. Well, some AP subjects are better than others, I think.</p>

5

<p>1) Did AP help in college prep? What helped? Course Content? Writing skills? Study skills?
Writing skills might have helped, I don't know. God knows I didn't really have any study skills beyond those I'd picked up in my Latin classes, and they didn't even lead to the AP Latin Vergil exam--I self-studied for that one. </p>

<p>2) Did you receive college credit or advancement for your AP work? Did it help you to be advanced? Did the AP content cover what was expected by your college for the courses you were credited with?
Yes, for a total of 51 credit-hours. Yes, because I was able to exempt core classes that I didn't actually need for my proposed field (e.g. history classes when I'm a Genetics major) which means I can take courses which I find more interesting. As far as I can tell, yes for the one AP I had for which I've taken a builds-on class, which was my Chem AP, with the exception of knowing the names of a bunch of compounds. Oh, and the Calc II class I took, but that one was compounded by a terrible teacher--most people in the class knew the basic concepts coming in, but he usually managed to make tests a level of magnitude harder than anything he actually assigned us as practice and most of the class routinely failed hard without a heavy curve. And he wasn't typically /intending/ to curve. </p>

<p>3)Did you graduate from college? What school? Or if still in college what was your GPA after 4 semesters?
N/A. Am a current freshman in college. </p>

<p>4)If you graduated from college, are you in a career related to your college degree?
N/A</p>

<p>5) In high school, did you have only AP or did your school offer other advanced academic programs? If so, which one did it offer? Did your school offer joint IB/AP courses?
Only AP was offered.</p>

<p>6)How many AP tests did you take and which ones? What State or Country did you do your AP work?
Ten: World History, Chemistry, English Language, US History, Psychology, Macroeconomics, Biology, Calculus AB, Latin Vergil, and English Literature. Did my work in Georgia. </p>

<p>AP exams are much easier to do "very well" on than actual college courses, IMO. They require less work to study for, and the multiple-choice format is a much easier one to tackle than the short-answer format most of my professors prefer. In my experience, the essays and short-answers on the test were limited and it was possible to miss them and still do well. (On the other hand, I like the freedom that the sheer amount of credit I have gives me in choosing my courses.)</p>

6

<p>I guess it depends on the school but don't think that you are going to get an easy A in Organic Chemistry or Multivariable Calculus simply because you got a 5 on AP Chem and AP Calc BC.. hopefully, you won't be as arrogant in this regard as I was.</p>

7

<p>The APs helped somewhat in college work, but not that much; college work is just on a higher level. There were two things I noticed, however. I took AP Bio and we actually took the time to do all the labs. My intro bio class in college rehashed several of the same labs and used some of the same lab techniques. Some of the kids in class had also taken AP Bio but their schools hadn't done any of the labs, so they were kind of lost, while I had a leg up. The other thing is writing skills; although I'm majoring in sciences, I know the writing skills I learned from AP English helped with my English divisionals. We had a former college professor teaching us in high school, and we would write in class pretty much every day; at the beginning of the year, she pretty much gave us Cs on everything until we wrote to her specifications and at a high enough level to earn As. It was sort of "trial by fire" but it worked.</p>

<p>I did world history, one of the Englishes (lit, I think), bio, calculus (although I didn't take the exam because my teacher was horrible), US history, and Spanish, in NC. I got a little bit of credit - about 14 hours - although my college has since disallowed credit for AP courses.</p>

8

<p>All I'll say about AP's is that they knock a lot of bs lecture classes outa the way at the start. The great thing about APs (for me at least) is the fact that you can graduate earlier. However, you may get a nice knock in the face your first semester because you will be taking more advanced classes due to the fact that your AP's cover some of the intros.</p>