<p>In my D’s school, an A in AP is 5, regardless what s/he gets in the national exam; an A in honors in 4.5; an A in normal class is 4. So taking APs boost up one’s GPA. Very few people take the exam seriously. I’m sure in many schools the situation is different. In our area, academics is very much ignored. It’s all about being popular, sports, school plays, school band, etc. My D is a freshman. Her friends in upper classes told her nobody studies for the AP exam.</p>
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<p>You must have attended a very advanced HS. At our local schools, College Prep physics is best described as, ‘Physics is Phun’.</p>
<p>I think that h.s. teachers can’t teach at a college level. I tend to find the class much easier than the ap test. H.S. teachers just can’t prepare students very well. It depends on the school though</p>
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<p>Always? This is the kind of statement that givess CC a bad reputation!</p>
<p>My school forced you to take the AP test( the district payed for it) if you took the class. I think it’s a horrible system because a lot of people who know they have no chance of passing must take it so they just draw smiley faces and go to sleep. Seriously, about 50 of the people taking AP English Lit did this.</p>
<p>My daughter took APUSH and AP Lang Arts (Comp) as a Junior in May. When she got her scores yesterday she was stunned, at least by the AP LA test. She’s a Top 10% student overall and was probably a Top 5% student her junior year.</p>
<p>AP LA (Comp) - daughter got “A’s” both semesters in this class and was one of the brighter students in the class. She got a 5 on the practice test they gave in the class and she felt good going into the exam. The high school makes all kids take the AP exam if they take an AP course. We found out yesterday she received a 3 on the test … she was stunned and disappointed.</p>
<p>APUSH - daughter got “B’s” both semesters and had an absolutely terrible teacher. He was the varsity basketball coach and wasn’t a very good teacher. We found out yesterday she received a 2 on the test … wasn’t as surprised but she expected at least a 3 and was hoping for a 4.</p>
<p>It really depends on the teacher and how good they are and care, how they teach and what they are teaching. Either way, my daughter was disappointed and will now be forced to take the CLEP exams for college credit.</p>
<p>My APUSH teacher wasn’t very good either, and I got a 5. I think APUSH is the easiest test to score well in too.</p>
<p>^Okaaaaay…? Good for you for getting a 5 in APUSH. You’re so special and smart. </p>
<p>Just because you found it easy doesn’t mean everyone is that way. My grades for AP physics the class were a B and A- but I got a 1 on the test. It’s an enormous amount of material to cover and I was taking several other AP tests that week as well. Please don’t accuse me of not trying. I spent the summer before senior year studying the princeton review and taking notes, going on my teacher’s webpage and printing out the powerpoints and trying to understand it before I actually started the class. I was in her classroom 3 days a week an hour before school started trying to comprehend the material. I asked my peers for help and spent hours on the phone with my sister (a physics major) until I actually understood it. That’s how I scraped a B and A- in the class. On the test itself, I had forgotten a ton of material (only having put information short term in my brain for the tests in class) and realized I never understood a lot of it in the first place, especially the concepts behind the equations themselves. I’m glad I took the test; I tried my best. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault (lol but if you asked my parents it’d be mine for not trying hard enough even though I feel as though I did). But idk, I’m just wondering why you care so much why others fail while you do so well; you should just work towards your own standards.</p>
<p>Students take too many AP exams because school systems want to show favorable stats. My son’s high school wanted him to take 5 AP tests and wanted us to pay for them all. They thought we’d be honored. But we said NO! </p>
<p>We ended up paying for 2 because they were in the area of his college major. The school board paid the bill for two more. He got a 5 on the ones we paid for but only a 2 on the ones they paid for. </p>
<p>They touted only the 5’s. Which they then used in argument for Admin & teacher raises.</p>
<p>Now you know why schools absolutely love AP tests.</p>
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<p>Wow you know how to sarcastically respond to people’s forum post about an observation. You’re so special and smart.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s that at all. Like I said, lots of people get 5’s on the APUSH test, because it has the best curve. I don’t think getting 5’s on AP tests means anything, especially because so many people have them.</p>
<p>I’m sorry about what happened to you on the AP Physics exam, but don’t take it out on other people. I got a 3 and didn’t understand anything about physics when I took it. It clearly shows that the AP Physics exam doesn’t really say anything.</p>
<p>To all the people who say “well, some kids just have to fail for them to keep the curve,” that’s just not true. If everyone was performing better than the college students they have take the test every few years, everyone would pass. But that’s obviously not the case (though this year, AP comp. sci. kids did better than college kids!).</p>
<p>What irks me is when kids complain that they got bad scores becuse they had a bad teacher. Most of my teachers have been good, but I’ve had a few who were mediocre at best. The fact that you are in an AP class and recognize that the teacher isn’t good means that it is entirely your responsibility to make up for your teacher’s faults.</p>
<p>At DS school, I notice that the students do not study for the AP exams. They treat it like any other test and do not buy self-study guides. My DS only got a 3 on his Chem adn APUSH his junior year. He had thought that he was well prepared, but after taking the exam it was obvious that the chemistry teacher had gambled on the fact that the things he had skipped were actually on the test. I still think he is a great chemistry teacher, but didn’t cover many of the labs that showed up on the exam. The APUSH teacher has never had more than one 5 students in a year pass (with a three) the test. </p>
<p>He did learn his lesson from this and self-studied for his other exams this year and got 5s. So teaching has a lot to do with it, but so does preparing not just for the class but specifically for the exam. His school also offers no test prep for mandatory ACT SAT prep and most kids don’t self-study for that either (and it shows).</p>
<p>I’ll relate my experience with my AP exams this year:
For AP World I had the teacher who is acknowledged to be the toughest in the school. Every test we took for her class contained questions from old AP tests, plus our homework was super in depth.
For AP Environmental my teacher didn’t really stick to the curriculum, but we learned a lot, including a lot of extras, her mid term and final were harder than the AP exam.
For AP English Lang, my teacher was totally disorganised, taught the honours
curriculum instead of the AP, and didn’t do any AP prep until a few weeks before the exam. The ret of the year she geared us towards passing the county assessment (which is written for regular level students) and preparing us for the SAT, even after everyone in class had taken it. Oh, just to further expound, the honors curriculum is world literature, I them took the SAT II in literature and scored a 660, where-as a I scored 700 on a subject I hadn’t taken for more than a year.</p>
<p>At our HS, the results generally seemed to be similar, year after year. And it seemed to depend largely on the teacher. The person who taught AP MEH to sophomores was a great, charismatic teacher who always got great results. (S’s year the class average was over 4.) And I might add that I have observed that S seemed to know a hell of a lot about modern European history on a purely factual basis, and was interested in discussing it, also. This was not a regurgitation/drone class. On the other hand, the person who taught AP Macroeconomics was a nice guy but not exactly a first-class intellect and consistently got terrible results, reflecting the quality of the course.</p>
<p>S chose to take AP classes simply because they were more interesting. The brightest students were all together, the class moved faster, it was taught to a higher level. There was no impetus to do so to “buy” a higher GPA, because our HS does not weight grades at all. (If anything, taking all honors and AP classes might result in a lower GPA, especially for students who found them a stretch.)</p>
<p>S took 8 APs altogether, 5 senior year. One was an independent study. He got 5s on six of them, 4s on two others. (One of which had a teacher so bad that the students actually circulated a letter of complaint and submitted it to the administration. His contract was not renewed.) Although he had the study guides, to my knowledge he barely if ever cracked one, and certainly didn’t put in any visible time studying for the exams, although obviously he took them seriously and didn’t blow them off. (I think it was a matter of pride, since he knew he wasn’t getting credit or anything like that.)</p>
<p>Our HS would pay for the exam if the student’s family couldn’t afford it. In our case, the 5 exams senior year really were not doable. All I had to do was mention it to the G/T coordinator, and it was taken care of.</p>
<p>Every time APs come up we see a variety of opinions and experiences. It is apparently hard for some among us to understand that some kids just want to take more interesting/challenging classes, and that they don’t find 5 or 6 APs in a year unduly burdensome, and that they aren’t doing it for credit or for a GPA boost or whatever motivation is assumed. I really don’t think chaosakita brought it up in order to assert her personal superiority.</p>
<p>The thing that so many people here seem to forget is that not everybody enrolled in AP classes gets to come from the same cushy, upper-middle class suburban backgrounds that so many people on CC come from. There are kids enrolled in AP classes who go to urban inner-city schools where half the class fails to graduate. There are kids enrolled in AP classes who attend small, poor, rural schools in the south or Midwest where the majority of kids plan on either joining the military or attending a small community college after graduating. So many people on here fail to realize that.</p>
<p>Not EVERYBODY who takes an AP class is going to attend a top 50 school when they graduate. Not everybody who takes an AP class has the same resources or are aware of the same resources that we are. There are many people, many of them rather bright, who are blissfully unaware of the competitive nature of college admissions in top 50 schools. I’m pretty sure the average person doesn’t even know that SAT Subject Tests even exist, or know that things like AMC/AIME or the Biology Olympiads exist! Most people don’t care if they don’t get into Harvard or Williams or MIT. Hell, I’m pretty sure there are people out there that aren’t even aware of the existence of Harvard or Williams or MIT (okay, maybe Harvard =p).</p>
<p>They don’t enroll in an AP class with the intent of taking the exam to please admission officers in the cutthroat world of college admissions. Some kids just take them to challenge themselves, or because they find the class interesting, or because they want to separate themselves from the kids who don’t really want to learn much in regular-level classes.</p>
<p>Why is that something that is difficult to comprehend for a lot of people? Not EVERYBODY has access to or are aware of the same resources that we have.</p>
<p>Rob–what difference does it make where the student comes from? If they are enrolled in an AP class, the school feels they should be a strong enough student to do well in the class. AP classes are supposed to have nationwide standards so kids can pass the tests.</p>
<p>As for the OP and her remarks about how ‘easy’ the tests are-kid my son graduated with got 5’s on all 27 AP tests he took, most of them taken before 9th grade, there will always be someone smarter than you are out there so be careful to whom you brag…</p>
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<p>It depends on how you define “score well”, but if you consider the percentage of kids scoring a 4 or a 5 on a given test, then you are not only wrong, but very wrong. I just eyeballed the 2011 results enough to see that UPUSH had one of the lower 1/3 combinations of 4/5s.</p>
<p>In 2012 only ~33% got a 4 or 5. Compare that to BC Calc where 67% scored a 4 or 5. Obviously APUSH isn’t the easiest to do well on.</p>
<p>All the history exams are graded brutally for some reason. It’s just a subject, just like the others. I don’t like how collegeboard grades ridiculously on some exams, and somehwat easier on others. For example, us history and euro history are known to have very low scores. Where’s the physics b for example has pretty good scores. Also they know some exams are notoriously difficult and some a joke like AP psych, collegeboard continues its tomfoolery. </p>
<p>Sent from my Desire HD using CC</p>
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<p>Holy cow!! :D</p>
<p>^^he is scary smart…he completed all of the math classes at the state flagship by the end of he sophomore year in high school and they designed a special math program for him for junior and senior year with some profs at MIT. He probably should have just gone to college but he wasn’t ready socially or emotionally according to his parents.</p>