AP Frustration- Jonathan Byrnes

AP classes have either ended or will shortly end after this month. I finished my AP Bio class on May 14th after I took my AP exam. AP classes were extremely difficult this year given our hybrid A/B schedule, causing us to lose many days of class. This only made us have to learn the entire curriculum faster in order to have at least 2 weeks of review before the exam.

For those who don't know, the AP Bio exam is 3 hours long: 1 hour 30 minutes for 60 multiple-choice, and then 1 hour 30 minutes for 6 free-response questions that consisted of 4 parts each. You can score from a 1-5 on all AP exams where a 5 would roughly translate to about 80%+, and approximately 12.5% of kids get a 5. These exams are very stressful as you work to recall a whole year's worth of information for a single test.

Since these AP classes are college-level courses, you are capable of earning college credit. However, the downside of this is that many colleges will only grant credit for students who received a 4 or 5 on the exam. Even then, there are many colleges that won't give out credit for that specific class because they prefer you take their version of that class. However, some colleges will allow you to put the credit you earned towards other classes like Gen-ED classes (General Education classes outside of your major like English or Math). 

Say you excelled in your AP class, ending with a solid A or A+, then you get your exam score and find out you didn't do so hot, now being denied access to some college credit because of these exams. All you get out of it is the golden reward of watching all of that time, effort, and money spent go down the drain. One nervewracking exam with your anxiety and stress off the charts ends up determining so much for a kid's future.

Someone could easily skip an entire year of college due to all the college credit they earned on their AP exams, saving them thousands and thousands of dollars. Scholarships can help cover the expensive college tuition but people are still going to have to pay out of pocket and paying back loans. So many people could earn college credit and save time and money in college, but one little test prevented that from happening. Students already deal with stress and anxiety from school, sports, or their home life, and now is exponentially increasing since many people are relying on good test scores to get them college credit or academic scholarships. 

Personally, I feel that students should be given college credit based off of their final average in that class. Right now, our education system has set up AP classes to focus on how well teachers can prepare students to answer multiple-choice questions and free-response questions instead of making sure students understand and know the entire content. What's more important, passing an exam that takes little bits and pieces of the curriculum, or truly knowing and understanding the concepts taught in that class? How can you expect students to do well on these exams when there are teachers who've struggled to score well on multiple-choice practice tests?