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Wednesday, October 14, 2015

The High School AP Course Joshua Liao

 The High School AP Course
Joshua Liao


                These days, we often hear stories of high school students who pull all-nighters to study for tests and constantly operate on 3 to 4 hours of sleep. Many people wonder why a single student would overload their course schedule and put themselves through so much trouble. I too used to wonder until just recently, I realized the motivation and reasoning behind it. AP courses called AP for a reason: they are advanced placement courses meant to be taken by the most motivated high school students. The course load for these subjects is rigorous and a single day’s worth of homework from one class often requires most of the evening to complete. When colleges look into a student’s schedule, one of the main factors that they look for is the AP grade. For students who want to get into elite top 25 colleges, getting anything lower than a B in an AP course can be detrimental to their future. Therefore, students will often go to extreme levels to get the grade that they need. Every test and quiz in an AP class requires hours of studying, reading, and memorizing to prepare for. Even then, a student who does all this is not guaranteed an A. The tests are composed of critical thinking questions that often take much longer than the allotted time to complete. Students realize that their fellow classmates, their competition for a stop in one of the elite top 25 colleges, are not only taking one of these AP courses, but multiple. As a result, they continue to add AP’s to their schedule. With multiple courses requiring massive amounts of study time, it is inevitable that students will run out of time during the four to five hours they have in an evening to complete their homework, and will have to spend a portion of the night finishing course work. However, due to the students (and possibly their parents) motivation, every year a new crop of AP students will undergo this massive task and try to come out in a better position to enter a top 25 college.

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