<p>Might the difficulty of the Spanish tests be because of its widespread proliferation among High Schools? As a native speaker, of course you’re going to be fine with you language, but has anyone here learned both Spanish and another, non-native language? We need an unbiased comparison, difficulty of learning nonnative Spanish vs nonnative French/German/Japanese/Chinese. English takes heavily from Latin, so that should be relatively easy, but is there an accurate “ranking” of the foreign languages, in terms of difficulty, or is it entirely up to personal preference?</p>
<p>There was an AP ranking game here on CC but that’s not reliable, hahaha xD</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, but the AP curves are determined by how well college students do on the tests.</p>
<p>So, how well high school students do in any given year or how many students take the exams would be irrelevant. Except I think that the widespread proliferation of Spanish means that some teachers take it less seriously and don’t teach it as well as they should, especially if 10% (at least of my class) of every AP Spanish class is filled with native speakers. The kids who are taking French at my school definitely have more rigorous coursework.</p>
<p>At a presentation to the Board of Education, our school system revealed that over 70% of our county of 144,000 students (with 70,000 middle school and up) takes Spanish.</p>
<p>So jealous of schools that pay for AP’s. I bet if we had that at our school people would take AP’s ‘just for fun’ and we’d bankrupt the school system XD </p>
<p>I just always HATED spanish (not sure why), so I took french. It was the only class I actually got a B in (only 1 quarter though, ended up with an A for the semester:)). I feel sorry for any nonnatives taking chinese at my school because there are so many natives in the classes. </p>
<p>I looked at the AP Ranking Game and the order of the languages was (easy to hard) Italian, japanese, french, spanish, german, spanish lit, Latin: Vergil…so yeah. This is obviously not the most accurate way to rate AP’s because it is strongly skewed. But it’s all we’ve got because people rarely take more than 2 lang AP’s (and even then the second is usually their native language). </p>
<p>Self studying any language is a huge time and energy commitment, you will also probably need some sort of human interaction like a tutor or a class which requires money. Unless you’re one of those people with ‘an ear for languages’ you would have to work really, really hard. But hey, more power to you. Good luck :)</p>
<p>My school only offers 4 AP’s…</p>
<p>My school doesn’t offer many either, but I’m working on doing self-studying so that I can take some of the ones my school doesn’t offer. Not to mention, I’m in a program that severely limits my schedule… so… I know how you feel.</p>
@Practical he may be a nerd, but today, he is classified as a successful individual and he graduated from my high school. He gave an amazing speech at our 2015 graduation and is a well spoken individual. He may be an over achiever as some may say, but that’s why he is successful.
Also, you do not need to take 22 ap classes for the state ap award, but taking as many as you can handle would be advised because there are a small number of other students across the state who are trying to take as many ap courses as they can as well. Aim for a 5 on about 95-97% (imo) of all ap exams you take.
You can easily self study Calc AB and Calc BC if you truly enjoy math. Same for chemistry and if your memory permits, Bio could be self studied too. Check the grading curves for the tests because the year I took Bio, College Board gave a 5 to the top 5 % of scorers for the exam, and then followed a different method to dish out the other scores.
Good luck!
@lightning1997 this thread is over four years old.