Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of students across the country eagerly waited for the second week of July for the release of their AP scores. I was not one of these students. Instead, through some technological trickery (not limited to changing my proxy server and accessing college webpages,) I managed to find out my score a whole four days before the official July 8 release date. However, this unscrupulous advantage still led to the same reaction that would have occurred had I not checked early: complete shock, relief and hard partying.
A little piece of backstory: second semester of junior year, I decided to leave AP Calculus AB and switch to BC, solely because I couldn’t stand the idea of any of my peers being better than me at anything. The switch didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time, but just as your pinky toe can’t avoid stubbing itself on cabinets, I could not avoid reality of the situation: I had to take all two semesters of Calculus BC in one semester, online. A logical plan of action would have been to study hard and start dating a prep book. However, I am not a logical person. After I discovered online derivative calculators and permanently lost my sense of morality, I put off every last assignment until the night before it was due and cheated through every single test and quiz.
Which is exactly how I got a 5 on the AP test. “And you said you didn’t know how to do integrals!” my friend congratulated me. I replied confidently, “I didn’t.” Because that fact was very much true, I decided to do some digging into what AP scores actually mean. According to the College Board, a 5 meant that I was “extremely well qualified,” which was blatantly false. After some more digging, I found out that you don’t actually have to answer a very high percentage of the questions correctly to earn a high AP score. One post from the blog Less Wrong claims that on most tests, you can score between 60 and 70 percent and still get a 5. The College Board’s own scoring worksheets seems to back this up, if you look at your composite score.
Of course, 60 percent still seemed unbelievably optimistic for me. I searched for more explanations. Multiple-choice tests aren’t the best way to gauge knowledge, as they tend to focus more on breadth than depth and are valued for their cheapness and ease of grading. And my AP Language teacher had told us that the AP readers typically read through an essay or free-response question once and give you a score without hesitation or mercy.
All joking aside, AP tests are broad. Even students at alleged “good” AP schools can’t escape endless PowerPoint presentations and a five-minute bulleted explanation of German unification. Those five minutes in class and 15 minutes of reading at home can’t explain all of the people and processes of a historical movement, so the AP test can’t realistically test on the finer details or anything besides buzzwords. And the skills taught in class are practically useless outside of the context of the test. Arguably, you could earn three of the six points on a history DBQ or document-based question without having any specific knowledge of an event. As long as your thesis is mostly true, you’ve cited six out of the seven documents, and you attempted to link the documents to your thesis, you’re good to go. Furthermore, you’ve spent the whole year practicing writing essays in 45 minutes, so basic grammar and more complex consideration and planning get thrown out of the window. Perhaps your teacher has a shred of human dignity and wants you to practice writing that doesn’t involve the AP test. Every minute that you spend learning about comma placement takes away from your time memorizing the definitions of rhetorical devices, and perhaps your AP score will drop several points.
And in the end, you will never know why you scored how you did. You will never know how close you were to a 3 rather than a 4, unlike some systems of education. Yet, we let these numbers define us. They grow on us and invade our psyche. You assume that because you got a 4 on your biology test that you understand less than someone who scored a 5, when maybe the person who scored a 5 was just really good at eliminating multiple-choice answers. And sometimes we score better than anticipated and convince ourselves that we really are quite gifted and talented and smart and good at math, when we would be better off spending our summer thoroughly reviewing all of that calculus we never learned in the first place. Not me, though. I’m sure the College Board is completely accurate in its diagnosis that I’m “extremely well-qualified” for God knows what, and I trust it entirely.
