<p>I took AP Stat this year because everybody thought it was gonna be a joke. We got a new teacher who is strait out of college and has no business teaching high school seniors. Our teacher sucks so much that the information becomes that much harder, and with people taking other AP's nobody studies, and we all fail...except for the kid going to Yale.</p>
<p>i notice that the AP language classes (Spanish, French, etc.) haven't been mentioned (i think)... what do you all think about those classes ("fluff" or not)?</p>
<p>at my school French 4 and 5 (AP) are the same class. and it is a joke. I think for FL it would definitely depend on the teacher though.</p>
<p>In spanish, the level between honors spanish and AP spanish is HUGE... I got easy As in honors spanish, but am struggling to get by with a B in AP... AP is just so much more holistic/comprehensive and immersive than honors spanish was. In honors spanish, all we did all day was crossword puzzles while in AP, it's listening, formal presentation one after another</p>
<p>AP French is a lot more work than previous levels, but it's still menial and dumb.</p>
<p>At my school AP Spanish is an easy class where everyone fails the AP test, haha. XD Seriously, we do less work than the 4H class. (of course, most people actually took 4H first...).</p>
<p>You can rank the difficulty of the tests but not the courses, since they are all different. At my school, AP classes are extremely difficult, but the AP test is factored into out grade so almost everyone gets a 5. Over 3/4th's of our AP classes get 5', no joke.</p>
<p>at my school, ap us gov is only half a year, and then the other half is either honors sociology or honors economics. the cool thing is that your weighted as an ap class the entire year!</p>
<p>Our hardest APs are definitely APUSH, Physics C (like THE hardest class @ my school) and BC...</p>
<p>However, basically all our other AP classes are pretty much killers anyways....</p>
<p>My school pushes us pretty hard...basically everyone gets like 5s or 4s. In BC and Physics like 95% get 5s while the other 5% get 4s...Our AP bio program is also proclaimed to be "the best in the world" though it's only based on percentage passing...it's actually one of our easier APs (though it's not a slacker class)</p>
<p>The only exception to this is probably comp sci, where the teacher doesn't teach....</p>
<p>ha, the funniest thing is, the hardest course in my school district is 11th grade honors english. i took it, and it is brutal, SO MUCH WORK. i really think APs are up to the discretion of the teacher, it's easy to either make a course harder or easier.</p>
<p>our blowoffs are psych, econ, stats, and enviro.</p>
<p>Do you really think with 27,000 or 20,000 applicants, they are individually pro-rating the AP courses you took or did not take based on perceived difficulty at your particular highschool? </p>
<p>Wow.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Obviosuly colleges know that APs like Physics C and Calc BC are tougher than Physic B or Calc AB? But do they know that classes like AP Environmental Science and Statistics are just glorified honors classes if that? does anyone have a ranking system on how hard they think the AP classes are?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think they can form some opinions- for example, AP Latin is known to be very, VERY difficult and if you were to pass the exam, then that would be accomplishing a big feat. However, they won't look down at you for taking an AP class and passing the test. I doubt an adcom would say, "Oh, he took the EASY AP class- AP English Lang," mostly because it differs from school to school. One person's difficult APUSH might be another's APES. Colleges can look at your school's passing rate on the test, but of course, that doesn't say anything about the actual DIFFICULTY of the class.</p>
<p>I know that some schools have different levels of difficulty in their AP classes than others, but I think on average, AP Stat is a joke. It's one of the easiest AP's at my school.</p>
<p>Easy ones:
Stat, human geo, gov't, psych, us history (somewhat)</p>
<p>Hard:
Calc BC, chem, bio</p>
<p>I'm not sure about our physics.</p>
<p>I think at my school, AP Chem, AP Calc, and APUSH are the hardest classes, while the easiest are Stats and English (both of them). A lot of this has to do with the teachers and their grading policies. Like right now, I feel like I can get a 5 on the APUSH test because I feel so well prepared, but I've never gotten anything higher than a 92% for my grade.</p>
<p>Can someone please explain why everyone thinks AP Stats was easy? I took it as a sophomore and it was challenging.</p>
<p>While APs are in principle more challenging than normal classes, colleges have an idea of the amount of SUBJECT MATTER covered in each class. Obviously College Board can't sit in on every class to determine its worth academically, but if one class has like 10000000 chapters to cover compared to like 50 for another class, then there's a blatant discrepancy. </p>
<p>I would also like to point out that the so-called "easy APs" also have the smallest percentage of 5s (ie. US History, Environmental Science, English Language), so in theory, the classes shouldn't be easy, since not very many people are getting 5s.</p>
<p>As demonstrated in this thread, class difficulty varies widely from school to school, but the some classes will always be considered the hardest.</p>
<p>^^because it's not as hard as other AP's[ Physics BC, Chemistry, Latin, APUSH] !</p>
<p>At my school AP Chem is the deadliest (and my grades in that class are scarily low). Like last year was the first year where any students passed her midterm and those who did just barely passed (all 2 of them), whereas something like AP Psych is a joke and a lotta people in that class are in no other AP/honors classes at all and are taking it to get outta taking AP Gov't.</p>
<p>It's funny how we both used APUSH to make our points. But yes, those are some of the hardest APs at my school too. But just b/c those are the hardest, doesn't mean that the other APs are "blowoffs" as the OP stated.</p>