<ol>
<li>How difficult is it?</li>
<li>How many years of Latin did you take prior to taking the exam?</li>
<li>How much did you prepare?</li>
<li>What score did you receive?</li>
</ol>
<p>And...would y'all recommend taking AP Latin assuming that I want to pursue a STEM career? I really enjoy the subject, but I heard how colleges want a well-rounded CLASS instead of a well-rounded INDIVIDUAL, so I'm not sure if taking the class will make my transcript look unfocused. </p>
Really difficult (he was NLE honored multiple times before it)
He was in his 6th year of Latin, but they consider the first year “year 0” so fifth year is probably a better estimate.
In class prep mostly, but also there is one review book out there based on the old version. He also tried old exams that the College Board has online - but they were only Virgil.</p>
<p>If you’ve had four years of Latin and no other language, you should consider taking AP Latin. Find out the scores from previous years at your school.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone in my son’s school got above a 3, and he got a 2 and someone he knows got a 1. </p>
<p>The advice is that if your teacher covers the two main authors in sequence, you better make sure to brush up on the first covered because the test is relatively 50-50. It would have helped him a lot more if the teacher realized that, but I think they had changed from Virgil only to both JC and Virgil this past year.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Incredibly difficult.</p></li>
<li><p>Six years. Like @rhandco’s son, I performed well on the NLE for several years before the AP exam. I received gold medals on Latin III-IV Prose and Latin III-IV Poetry, and I even got a perfect paper on Latin V-VI.</p></li>
<li><p>I prepared as much as I could. Multiple years of my study were focused directly on Vergil and Caesar, but the lack of AP Latin review books hurt me.</p></li>
<li><p>I received a 2.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Thanks for the feedback DiscipulusBonus, it made my son feel better (sorry!).</p>
<p>I didn’t answer about STEM though - I don’t think it would have much impact other than help if you are pre-med. </p>
<p>However, in terms of your resume being unfocused, my son has all sorts of classes and they do push languages at his school for everyone. I don’t think it matters too much if you take a breadth of classes; probably more than enough kids who super-specialize.</p>
<p>As an aside, for both of you guys, do you find that most of your Latin teachers are British (in the US)? Three of his four Latin teachers have been British. I do not know if that actually has some impact on preparation for the AP exam, since the AP exams are a US thing.</p>
Well I’m not to brag about my diligence or other crap, but I’d say it’s not that hard. It’s pretty much a time-consuming thing, and most American students (especially those whining about the inhuman difficulty of it here) just didn’t take it seriously. I spent less than two years on it and took the exam as a high school junior last May – guess what, I got a 5 (I’M AN INTERNATIONAL STUDENT who speaks one of the tonal languages people).