I am currently a sophomore in High School. My schedule consists of 4 AP classes: AP Chemistry, AP European History, AP Psychology, and AP Biology and 2 Honors Classes. The first week has barely passed, and I am up to my eyes in homework. I am alright at time management, and generally pull good grades. I am writing this in between my homework. I need help figuring out how to handle so many AP’s for those of you who have done it. Any helpful tips to help manage my workload.
@Paperslayer902 Ask those at your school who have taken those classes before. Although the curriculum is the same, the way it’s taught, test difficulty, and homework load vary from school to school.
Another thing:
You signed up to take these courses. You should have thought about how to handle this many. There’s a reason many schools prohibit “doubling up” of courses, so students don’t get into trouble like this. You have a triple enrollment here IN ONE SUBJECT (Bio, Chem, and Psychology). I only took 1 honor my freshman year, 1 AP my sophomore year (wasn’t allowed to take any freshman year, and this was the only one available to me) and 1 honor, followed by 2 Honors and 2 AP junior year, and finally 5 APs senior year. My school has non-weighted requirements for underclassmen, and since I’m not in advanced math, I couldn’t take Calc my junior year. You should have planned out something before the school year started and asked other students what the classes would be like.
But if you need tips on AP Chem, I will be willing to help you.
Thanks @michelle426 for the advice, I will ask around, I might drop a couple of AP’s to lessen the workload. :)>-
Depends on the teachers tbh. I did no work in AP Chem and still got an A but others had to put a lot of time into it. AP Psych is usually easy but our school had a teacher that a lot of students struggled in.
Prioritize. For some of classes you might only need to skim something quickly and rush through the homework and you’ll still get a good grade/understand the class. Figure out what you absolutely HAVE to finish, and do that first.
Of course, this depends on your school and your teacher, and how fast you work and how easily you grasp the material. For example, in my AP Chem class we had homework every single day that was always strictly graded, but in AP Bio we didn’t have homework every day and my teacher only checked off homework. Needless to say for AP Bio I only did homework and studying when I needed to, while for AP Chem it was a daily thing.
I didn’t take AP Psych but I know many people at my school thought the class and test was easy. AP Chem and AP Bio will probably be your toughest classes (though I personally found AP Bio to be pretty easy).
My biggest advice:
Sleep!
My grades went up the year I was taking 5 AP’s when I stopped staying up until 2 and kept a consistent (usually 9:30 to 6:00) sleep schedule.
It actually works (for me and lots of other people per randomized studies, at least)
For me this also meant doing homework/studying for ~2 hours each weekday, ~4 hours each weekend day, even when there was nothing due for a day or two. The consistency helped me avoid long nights of 8+ hours of studying.
Good luck!
@julianstanley @simaril Thanks for the great advice, I definitely will try to prioritize, all the while getting more sleep. :)>-
Cramming is good. You should cram a little bit for every exam. However, you should also study before the test and start studying x amount of days before the test depending on how hard you expect the test to be. For example, I studied a week early for my midterms and 2 weeks early for the AP exams. Honestly, you need to figure out what works for you. This works for me and you need to figure out what works. You’ll fail once and get a bad grade but it’s how you learn what’s right