Over the past month, teachers and students have had only one thing on their minds: course selections. For many high school students, their only goal is to fit as many Advanced Placement (AP) classes as they can into their schedules. Choosing AP classes can be hard, especially if there is pressure from peers to take them. However, given the hard work and stress that comes with AP classes, students should only take them if they have a passion for that subject.
College Preparatory (CP) courses function as preparation for college classes, whereas AP classes aim to replicate the true pace and content of a college class, making them more rigorous.
“The AP courses generally go much deeper into the content. They have a lot of independent work students have to do and the level of rigor is a little higher,” Parul Kumar, an AP Chemistry teacher at LHS, said.
The well-known benefits of AP courses don’t come for free. There’s often less guidance, stricter standards, and more difficult assignments, which can become shocking for students who are used to seeing straight A’s in their Aspen portal.
AP classes also shouldn’t be signed up for on a whim, but instead be thoughtfully and carefully considered. What other time commitments do you have? Do you still want to go out on the weekends? How will the added workload of APs interfere with that?
“I see people who take AP courses that have a lot of stress. Also, some students, due to peer pressure or due to the fact that they just want to take a challenging course just for the heck of it, they take it and then they’re not able to manage it,” Kumar said.
This is especially common for the science AP courses, where many students have minimal background knowledge going into the class. In AP Biology, for example, students jump directly into a college-level Biology curriculum with no prior experience and are expected to keep up with the rigorous pace.
Nevertheless, the rigor of the AP curriculum is not necessarily disadvantageous to students who are genuinely interested in a particular subject. It encourages students to put time into learning subjects they find enjoyable. Although AP courses can be challenging, they can help students learn to manage their stress.
“I managed stress from AP classes by not assigning too much value to it. Obviously, I should try my best; it’s a class, you should try your best in the class. But it doesn’t decide my future. Advanced Placement does not define your intelligence, because everyone learns differently. AP classes are formatted to a very narrow type of teaching,” Sophia Pjura, a junior at LHS, said.
The reality is, your best work will not always get you the same grade it would in a CP level class. It’s easy to get discouraged when seeing a lower score, and that can reflect negatively on a student’s mental health.
So for all the students considering their AP choices for next year, take a second to ignore what your friends are doing, ignore what your parents want, and think about the class where you’ll actually enjoy what you learn.
