AP Exams

With the AP exams approaching, everyone is trying to study everything they have learned, or not learned, throughout the year. I have always thought that the best preparation for the exams starts with the first day of class. If you do the reading and home work assigned throughout the year the less you need to review what you have learned. The problem is though, that many times you do the assignments just to get them done, not to learn. With three AP classes this year, I am a culprit of practicing that many times throughout the year. I had to do it because of the extreme amounts of home work that was assigned on those random nights.

I completed home work without learning many times in order to continue increasing my GPA. Unfortunately for me however, our GPA has no impact whatsoever on your exam score.

This time of the year is when the AP teachers start handing out practice exams to help prepare their students for the real deal. When I sat down this year to take some of those practice tests, fear and regret greeted me with a punch in the face. I feared that when I actually took the AP exam that I would be as clueless as I was when taking the practice test. I regretted those nights when sleep became a higher priority then learning. The nights I did the homework only to keep my grades and GPA up instead of doing it to learn and further ready myself for the AP exam.

The last two years I have only taken one exam and I passed last years one, but not the one my freshmen year. So hopefully I pass two of them this year and get to be an AP scholar. But I am worried about this year because my attention is divided between three classes. Because of this my reviewing time compared to last years is cut into thirds. I am very lucky this year that they have greatly reduced the prices of the exams. If it was the same price as last year’s exams then I would be paying around 240 dollars for the three tests. Thanks to this new scholarship program, these exams will cost around 150 dollars. Hopefully, I do well enough on the tests than I could be refunded and the tests could end up costing as little as 51 dollars.