By Logan Tracy (Staff Writer)
May is known as the month of AP Exams. With both my first ever AP exams behind me, I can say with confidence that It was not worth the stress and preparation. I have many reasons for why I hate these tests.
My first complaint is that the tests are set to a strict time construct. The given time is what’s “supposed” to be enough for each student, but everyone learns differently. Does how quickly you can take a test really show that you know more or does it just show you can complete a test quicker? With the time given I barely had enough time to think through my answers and many times I was in such a rush to finish the work that I knew it was far from my best work. At times it felt like the test wanted me to fail.
Another reason it feels like they want you to fail is the wording on some questions are unnecessarily confusing. If they want to make it hard, make the difficulty of the content harder, not make the questions harder to understand. How does that show someone’s understanding of their content? They attempt to trick you for no reason other than to make the test harder. My test had wording I had never prepared for, which caused me to have no idea how to answer the question. Like what is even the point of changing the wording when we have been studying certain wording the whole time.
I spent the whole year in AP US History learning American history to prepare for this test. Then after taking the test I realized I had used not even a fraction of the things I’ve learned, yet everything I learned was supposedly based around preparation for this test. We never went into the details of U.S history without the content being based around the AP exam. Not having a test to teach too allows for more things to be explored in US history. If I hadn’t been taught so closely to the test I probably would have gotten much more out of the class. Not to mention the mass amount of homework I had to prepare for this test which in hindsight essentially was close to a waste of time because that work did not help very much on the test.
Another gripe I had with taking the tests was in regards to the environment. The tests were held in a cold gym with tons of students in one room. Every sound a student made was heard not to mention the sounds of the bells and sounds from students not in the exam. Focusing becomes extremely difficult, yet another thing going against you when taking the test.
Overall the test experience is awful and spending a whole class preparing for it is useless when we could be genuinely taking the time to fully understand the subject instead of teaching to the test.
