Everyone knows that to get into a decent college, you have to take AP courses in high school. But do you really?
Most high schoolers aim to take a few AP classes, before they graduate, in order to earn college credits, take higher level courses for their transcript, and to learn something new (I’m just kidding, let’s be real …. nobody takes an AP class to learn something new).
In 2017, 1.17 million high school students took AP classes. Just a year before, this number was 1.14 million — 0.03 million more students took AP classes, in the span of one year. Looking at this number over a span of a decade, only 23.9 percent students participated in AP classes in 2007, while 37.7 percent students took AP courses in 2017. This is a major jump; but what inspired this dramatic increase?
Some would argue, ‘the fast-paced and highly competitive world we live in today’, resulted in students becoming competitive, earlier in their education. While this may be true, I think some student are caught up in a blinding mind set of society.
The idea that AP classes must be taken to make one’s transcript stand out, or that you need it for college credits, has been engrained into our thought process. Sadly, some people follow this mentality, without giving it much thought.
So what’s the point of AP classes? Is it all just a scam?
CollegeBoard is a business that scams students out of hundreds of dollars, each year. Students must pay to take AP exams, take the SAT, send scores to colleges, and to rush order scores in case they won’t arrive in time. While this may seem worth it — if you can get equivalent college credits — some students are devastated to find that their future college may not even accept these credits. In this case, students find themselves wasting hundreds of dollars.
So what do you think? Is it worth taking an AP class, just because everyone is doing it?
Looking at AP classes from a different point of view, most students categorize AP as the ‘smart-student classes’, while honors and academic-level classes are seen as a lower standard. But how true does this hold? I would say, it all depends on the teacher.
Because AP classes are known for their rigorous course load, some teachers teach-to-the-test. They only cover the material found on the exam, and forego the rest. As a result, some may argue that the class is easier than a real college course — or maybe even easier than an equivalent high school honors course. In comparison, some teachers pack students with course work — giving them the real college-level-course experience. Depending on one’s teacher, they may have found their AP level class to be a ‘breeze’ or found themselves struggling with the amount of work.
Again, this lack of consistency, causes a disparity within courses. Two students taking the exact same course, may have had two completely different experiences.
So, are AP classes a true equivalent of a college course? Is it fair that some teachers prepare students for real college courses, while the others give them a free-pass with an ‘AP’ title?
This is such a real problem that I know that I definitely struggled with in high school. Guidance counselors would always say “just take classes that you like” and “don’t load up on APs just to take APs”, and in theory that’s what school should be. Students take the classes that they are interested in and put themselves through a reasonable workload. But everyone secretly knows that you have to take APs to get into a good college. Its so hard to not get caught up in “playing the game” in terms of making a transcript look good with APs because while everyone pretends that “the game” doesn’t exist, it does exist and you just can’t ignore it.
The timing of this post was really interesting as we just had two groups present (including mine) about the education system, some of the argument encompassing APs and SATs so the topic is fresh in my mind. From my personal experience I think it really depends. Some AP classes I took in highschool such as APUSH were alot more work than my classes now. I think teachers often stress the importance of transitioning for college, but I didn’t really notice much of a difference between difficulty levels of classes, but this also might be affected by COVID.
I agree with the portion of the post that the expectation and standard that high school students will take an AP class, caused school to be a more competitive environment. My motive when taking an AP class, along with my of my other classmates’, was so that my transcript for college would stand out against others’. I think most of the time high school students, including my past self, are blindsided by the standards of society and do not value the education they will receive from taking an AP class.
In my experience, AP courses are not at all the equivalent to a college course. In high school I strove to take these courses because of how beautiful they made my GPA look. But I was also motivated by that high school credit. So, in these courses, I would practically check out as the instructor taught the content. Then, before the big in-class exam, I would cram to teach myself the entire content of the course in the few days before the exam so my GPA could stay pretty. And boy did it. So I continued this. This did not stop when the AP exam came along, I knew that it could be a huge money saver to get the credit and skip the college course so for this exam, I crammed the entire course, relearning it all right before the exam. Again, doing well and getting the marks but simply retaining nothing at all. I could agree that the exams and AP course are a scam because I couldn’t tell you a single thing I learned in APUSH despite getting a 5. How could that be a mechanism really proving our knowledge and making us effective learners? I would agree it could not.