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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