Hi, I’m going to be an upcoming junior and woop be taking 4 AP classes this upcoming year. I just wanted to ask if anyone could give me any advice on any of the ap’s I’m taking based off of personal experience. These are the ones I’m taking:
AP US History
AP English Language
AP Physics 1
AP Chemistry
Thanks in advance for the advice!
I was in AP chem this past year, and I took both the chem and physics tests. If you don’t already have good study habits, you’re gonna struggle with chem. Electrochemistry only comes up once, but a lot of people found it difficult. Equilibrium concepts are super important, and they never really go away, so make sure you’re solid on the concept (as well as setting up rice tables, solving for concentrations and K values, etc.) If your teacher doesn’t already do this, I would highly recommend doing free response problems from older AP Chem exams as you move through the different topics. Working quickly is important on this one, and I know a lot of smart people from my class that simply ran out of time on the free response problems.
I was only able to take regular physics, but I took the AP exam and got a 4 without any extra studying (in retrospect, studying may have been a good idea…) At my school, regular physics covered ~90% of the topics that AP physics did, and aside from the handful of problems I’d never seen before, I didn’t have any trouble with the exam. If your algebra and trig skills are good, physics shouldn’t be too bad.
I think the classes you are taking together would make for a hard junior year, if the rigor of these courses at my school match up to the rigor of these same classes at your high school. I knew some people who took AP Physics 1 with a perfect transcript (no Bs) and ended up getting two Cs in that class, and this class being coupled with the information and application-rich Chemistry and APUSH might be a bad idea. This opinion is solely bases from my experience in my high school though. How difficult are these classes at your school?
No doubt it will make for a challenging year, but at my school many people take 3-4 AP’s in their junior year. A friend of mine took APUSH, AP Comp, AP Chem, and AP computer programming, and she passed with just one B (in computer programming- but to be fair, we had an awful teacher). The difficulty and workload of the average class varies a lot from school to school, and if you’re concerned about the workload I would suggest talking to students from your school who have taken four AP’s in a year. From my own experience, four is a reasonable number when combined with 1-2 serious EC’s.
@CacaoNut13 @ryanordy88 Thanks guys. And it’s hard to tell if these classes are rigorous at my school cause a lot of them have new teachers teaching them. For APUSH, the old teacher that taught it who had an amazing passing rate went to a different school, and the other teacher that use to teach it doesn’t want to teach it anymore, so my school made the US government teacher learn the curriculum for it during the year so I think he is the only teacher for APUSH this upcoming year. For AP Physics, the teacher is a new one at my school but from asking all my friends who took it this year, he seems to be a great teacher so I’m not too worried about the class. For AP English language, the teacher just started teaching AP this year and I’ve heard his class is really hard so I guess it’s a pretty rigorous class, I’ll have to see. For AP Chem the teacher has been teaching it for years now and she was my Chemistry honors teacher so I’ve asked her all about the class and everything and I’m sure I’ll be fine in it since Chemistry is my favorite subject and what I want to go into when I’m older.
Regarding taking 4 AP classes, I took 3 this year as a sophomore (World, Euro, Psych) and I didn’t think the work load was too much so I think I might be fine this year taking 4.
Yeah if you’ve already taken AP World and AP Euro you should be fine on APUSH. Good luck anyways it sounds like you have a really tough course load.
@history1000 Thanks man. I think I’ll be able to handle it
I can offer tips specific to APUSH and AP Lang, as I took the exams this year.
AP Lang- incredibly easy test. I did no prep besides taking a regular junior year english class and reading the Crash Course book two days before the exam (I got a 5). If you are a decent writer it will be a no-brainer.
APUSH- I aced both the exam and the class, which I think comes from the fact that I really, really love US History. Here is what helped me:
If you ever have any questions during APUSH, feel free to PM me to ask- I feel very confident in the material and would totally be willing to answer anything that might come up for you in terms of the material, test prep, etc.
I did well in APUSH and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so that may have helped a lot, but generally APUSH isn’t too bad if you A. have a great teacher and B. you know how to digest lots of information.
APUSH is inherently filled with lots of stuff you need to know. Not necessarily dates, persay, but many units require you to memorize terms, policies, events, etc (ex. the New Deal policies). The multiple choice on the AP test, as far as I remember, didn’t go too specifically into details, but shorts answers and essays really want you to do so.
You may be tempted to write a full-on analytical behemoths for the essays. Don’t do that. My teacher (who’s taught for 16 years and has an impressive track record) has said that the College Board is looking for people who know everything about the topic they’re asking for. That means if an essay asks for something on the Progressive Era, you will want to hammer out every single Progressive Era policy you can remember and sew them together (bonus if you know dates). The essay readers get very little time to gauge what you know about the subject, so showing off is your priority for the essays (or as my teacher called it, “barfing on the page”).
Make sure to practice timed short answers, because you get like four or five of them and very little time to do them. Practice writing them succinctly and efficiently.
Also, Hamilton helps a lot with anything between 1750-1800 ish.