AP Courses and Their Benefits

If your child is in high school, you may have heard of something called the Advanced Placement Exam, or AP Exam for short. If you don't know what it is, now might be the time to jump into the mix and get involved with your child's education.

AP Exams are administered at the end of the school year during which a student must take a course corresponding to the exam. There are 37 different courses (hence 37 different exams) in 20 different subject areas. The purpose of these courses is to expose a high schooler to the breadth and depth and curriculum of a college course, as each AP Exam is developed by a committee composed of college faculty and teachers.

The great thing about AP courses is that they simulate the depth and difficulty of college courses with double the time offered to the high school students. The time it takes a college student to complete 1 college course is 1 semester, while high school students who take AP courses will get the same information, just in the length of 2 semesters, followed by the examination the following May (high school semesters are usually August - December and January - May). This is rather handy, as it is early exposure to high school students of what college will be like without pushing the whole load on them all at once.

Each AP exam is rather long (around the same length as the SAT I think), as they must encompass the whole year's information and test it in one sitting. All of the exams are developed by a team of skilled college professors and high school teachers, and each exam is different from one year to the next, containing two parts - one part consisting of multiple choice and the second consisting of free response. The multiple choice portion of the examination will be feed into a machine, but the free response will (probably) be graded by the same committee who developed the exam, as they know the questions the best.

For example, if you are taking the AP Language Exam, your free response questions may consist of 3 essays, each with a 1 hour time limit. Likewise, if your exam is the AP Physics Exam, you may have 3 word problems in which you may have to draw free-body diagrams, make calculations, and solve for an answer. The language exams such as AP German will usually have an oral portion, and the music exams such as AP Music Theory will require sight-reading.

The AP Exams being graded by college professors has a good aspect in that they know the college curriculum and grading system the best, hence they will score the AP exams according to what they believe is college standards.

The grading system is on a 1 to 5 scale, 1 being the poorest and 5 being "highly qualified." It is based very much on how well the students taking it the same year will do, and your score will be fit among an average before it is determined. For example, if many students that year do extremely well, then scoring a 5 on an exam can prove to be rather difficult if you don't have a good grasp on the information, as your score will be slightly based on theirs.

Another perk of taking the AP exam is that if you do well enough, your scores can count for college credit. Many students come into college with sophomore status, because their junior and senior years of high school they took large amounts of AP exams which basically bypass their first year of college. Most universities have a page on their registrar's website indicating what exams they accept and what score must be achieved. Some schools may accept a 3, 4, or 5, on the AP BC Calculus exam, meaning that if you scored a 3, 4, or 5, your score will count as credit for the Calculus 1 course at your university, meaning you will not have to take it (and you will be one step closer to graduation!). This can be good, as some professors in college make their courses gratuitously hard, hence being able to skip out and already have credit is a good thing.

Even so, remember that if you don't retain the information learned in your AP courses, you will probably have trouble later on, as a lot of the courses in college are prerequisites for each other. If you took Calculus 1 your senior year, that means you will have 1 year of no calculus in between, although you may be required to take Calculus II in college, something that is built on Calculus 1 (although for Calculus not really).

Before you take the exam, you must indicate what colleges to send your scores to, as there will be about 3-4 spaces on the form to post the college's code. If you don't send an AP score to a school and decide to apply to it later on, they will not have your scores on file, hence making it more troublesome for you. After you take your exam, your scores will be sent to you via mail about 2 months later (mid-July).

If you (or your child) wants to have sufficient preparation for the college curriculum, make sure to take lots of AP courses starting your junior or senior year of high school. This will give you an idea of how rigorous the college curriculum is like and hopefully (if you score high enough) exempt you from particular courses. Here is a list of exams and courses currently available for credit:

Art History

Biology

AB Calculus

BC Calculus

Chemistry

Chinese Language and Culture

Computer Science A

Computer Science AB

Macroeconomics

Microeconomics

English Language

English Literature

Environmental Science

European History

French Language

French Literature

German Language

Complete Government and Politics

U.S. Government and Politics

Human Geography

Italian Language and Culture

Japanese Language and Culture

Latin Literature

Latin: Vergil

Music Theory

Physics B

Physics C

Psychology

Spanish Literature

Spanish Language

Statistics

Studio Art

U.S. History

World History

You may have noticed that some subjects seem to differ by one letter. This is because one exam will usually have some sort of material not covered on the other. For example, AB Calculus will not over Taylor Series and Expansions (A topic I despise), but the BC Exam will. Physics C will cover circuits and electricity, but Physics B won't. It is also more intensive and analytic.

So, what do you have to lose? Also, higher end universities such as the Ivies love to see AP course credit on your transcript. They feel that these are the students with the ambition and drive to succeed in a highly competitive environment at places such as Harvard.