I’ve been contemplating taking AP Lang for quite some time now. I feel as if I will regret it if I do not take it but I really need some opinions on the topic.
Here is an outline of my schedule outlook for next year(I will be a junior):
-AP Psych
-AP Us
-AP Comp Sci P
-Honors Spanish 4
-Honors Physics
-Honors Pre-Calc
-Honors English (Lang??)
-Some elective
^My school does block scheduling and we rotate classes every other day.
I truly would value any advice on this as I’m having a very hard time deciding if I should take it and I’m very last minute with coming to my decision.
I’ve always wanted to take the class because the content seems very interesting but I am not sure if it will be to much with my other classes. I have a job and I am also the assistant debate captain of my debate team, a junior officer for one of my honors societies and involved in many of them, and various clubs. I’m not sure if taking the class would interfere with any of that and any advice on the subject would be great.
If you were to take Lang, then you would have what the majority of people would say are two “easy” APs and two “normal” APs. Of course it varies from school to school and teacher to teacher, but the general consensus is that these 4 APs in particular are very manageable together. From my experience, Lang was not one of my hard classes junior year in terms of workload. I think it’s doable, and you seem very interested in the content so I would advise you to go for it. You can always drop down a level later if you find it overwhelming.
If I were you and worried about a too-demanding schedule, I would take AP language, and trade out AP Psych for an easier elective rather than not taking AP language. I think AP Lang is probably one of the most useful APs as it will preparing you for college-level writing no matter what your future major will be. AP Psych is probably a fun and useful class but not core. Can you take AP Psych senior year?
AP Psych - easy
AP CSP - easy
AP Lang - medium, could be easy depending on teacher
APUSH - medium
In my experience AP Psych was easy, APUSH was not hard, but rather time consuming, and AP Lang was also easy and time consuming. I ended up getting 5’s in APUSH/Psych and 4 in Lang (thought I deserved a 5 on that one though) so it’s really not the concepts that are difficult, but the work. If you are good at time management I think you should be fine. As for AP CSP I don’t know if it’s different from normal AP Comp Sci? Don’t know what the P means.
I would say if you’re confident in your time management skills, take it. I don’t think it’ll be an overwhelming step up from an Honors English class anyway.
CSP is Computer Science Principles, which is based off of UC-Berkeley’s CS10 course.
AP Comp Sci P is basically an intro version of AP Comp Sci A (which I will be taking senior year). I’ve heard Psych is a pretty easy course but for some reason at my school US and Lang are said to be pretty hard, although I’m not sure if it’s just because a lot of kids taking the classes personally can’t handle it. But thank you so much for the advice and like you said I think if I manage time well it should work out fine.
Thank you and that is also true. I took two AP’s this year and it was not to bad with my other courses and I feel the only thing holding me back is how rough 4 will be together. I’ve heard at my school that Lang is very difficult but hopefully it will be manageable.
Lang can vary a lot. At my school, Lang is considered the second hardest AP class (Lit is our school’s hardest). But other schools, Lang teachers pull stuff off online resources or make their class super easy.
Unfortunately I cannot drop Psych since it’s already set and stone in my schedule. For some reason at my school once you sign up for the course you cannot drop it. I was thinking a lot about what you said with how it will hopefully really prepare me for any major in the future so thank you for reinforcing that.
@ichen21 at my school from kids I’ve spoken to Lang is said to be one of the hardest as well and I feel like that’s one of the major things that is holding me back from taking it.
I took Lang as a junior this past year, and it did have more benefits than I anticipated. If you want to improve on reading/English tests (like on the SAT) this class can be very helpful and teach you strategies on how to tackle questions of this sort. At my school, it is not a hard class - if anything, it is more tedious and we do a lot of busy work.
Lang is great. If you want to take Lang I would consider who the teachers are. I feel while there are many benefits from Lang most of them come from having a good teacher. For me Lang was really a class which was an open area for the discussion of race, privilege, morality, existentialism, and so much more.
I agree with @womaninstem . Even though my Lang class was difficult (I scraped by first semester with a 90), I learned a lot from it and many of the skills I acquired made taking the SAT a lot easier.
Alternatively, the teacher can make it, if not difficult, very time consuming.
One thing about AP Lang which benefits all students regardless of their future career plans is that it will help make them better writers, which is invaluable the following year when writing application essays.
@skieurope I’ve heard that the teacher at my schools makes it a tough class but the fact that taking it will have benefits that will most likely help me forever outweighs it.
@ichen21 I’ve heard from kids at my school it’s very hard to maintain an A but it’s nice to see how many peoples its helped with the SAT.