Some may call me crazy, but I somehow managed to successfully maneuver my way through five AP classes my senior year of high school without completely falling apart at the seams.
To me, this situation seemed totally normal as a lot of my friends were taking on a similar course load. I had taken AP classes before so it just seemed natural to continue to increase that number every year. However, the more I mention it to others, the more I realize that this type of course load was really only common at my high school.
Taking AP classes was highly encouraged because our administration believed it would prepare us for our years in college and beyond. This made the students at my school an extremely competitive group. We all piled on as many AP classes as we could because we were all told that is what college would be like and that’s what colleges look for. Now that I’m starting to experience those said years in college, I realize how wrong they really were and how much unneeded stress I suffered through, thinking that was my only option.
Taking these classes wasn’t so bad all the time. I don’t regret the experience I had in each of them and I definitely learned a lot from all of my teachers. The emphasis on “college readiness” though, seems like a bit of a false narrative. I don’t think that taking these classes necessarily prepared me for my college classes, I think they just made me realize that I learned the secret to doing well on standardized tests.
I’ve noticed that I’ve developed different study habits for each of my classes in college versus the study habits I had for my AP classes in high school. The way my classes are taught and the work that goes along with them do not mimic the stress I went through with five AP classes, every single day for a whole school year.
The time management skills and my learned ability to read chapters upon chapters of a textbook without actually exploding is a benefit that I gained from my AP classes, though. I don’t think I would be able to function properly now that I have a different schedule every semester if I didn’t learn those skills earlier on.
If anything, AP classes helped me lessen my liberal education requirements which lets me add on a minor and take a few fun, random classes along the way. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think that high school students should be allowed to even take that stress on. I appreciate all of the work that my teachers did to make these AP classes easier and more fun, but considering that I don’t need to remember most of the information that I learned past high school, it’s becoming clear that the AP board is leading students to fear failure.
Fearing failure is something that can negatively impact so many students in the long run, and I see it when my friends are stressed about getting anything other than an A+ on an assignment. Sometimes it’s not so bad to have that motivation, but the AP system makes it hard for these motivations to come out of a genuine and ambitious place.
