When building the average Campolindo student, it’s crucial to ensure the terms “academic success” and “AP class(es)” are synonymously wired within their brain. It’s not uncommon for students to take a rigorous schedule of multiple APs up until graduation, building an impressive academic resume inside the classroom for the future outside.
Many juniors like Daniel Siu and Kai Iwasaki follow this similar suite. “I’m taking 5,” said Siu. “I might take 7 tests.”
Yet for students new to the AP scene, the preliminary struggles of heavy classwork and difficult concepts can quickly weaken an A+ student’s morale. Through teachers’ lectures as well as our – albeit at times unsatisfactory – test scores, the growing fear of failure may lead to the development of academic anxieties. Through this struggle, students find a common theme: We need to learn how to think AP.
Founded in 1900, the College Board is a non-profit organization which helps students develop the skills they need for post-high school education at college. The organization offers a variety of intro college level courses for highschoolers ranging from Math and Sciences to Language Arts. The College Board also developed the SAT, a common test for student’s academic skills used for college admissions.
Today, the organization brings students the academic rigor which shows universities that they are serious about their academic education. According to the site, students who take an AP “dig deeper into the subjects that interest them” as well as “learn to tap into their creativity and their problem solving-skills to address course challenges.”
However, those who take APs know that the combination of creativity and AP is a walking juxtaposition. Formulaic and repetitive in nature, the College Board makes little changes in their stimuli-based questions from class to class with their repetitive style of multiple-choice questions. “When I was doing the AP classroom questions [in AP Lang] those seemed really similar [as well as] the type of questions,” said Iwasaki.
While this may seem disappointing from a creative standpoint, the College Board’s test system gives some AP students an easy answer to “thinking AP”.
Although the 2020 pandemic caused many colleges including UC and California State schools to no longer require SAT scores in their current applications, the SAT has proven to be a valuable resource that can aid students in their APs. Junior Sonal Patel states, “for AP Lang, our multiple choice problems are very similar to the English section on the SAT. For Calc, [the SAT] has some of the basic concepts such as trigonometry.”
Further exploration by popular educational resources like the Princeton Review found that categorized questions and concepts of what the College Board deems as some of their most important skills are often condensed by the SAT.
Furthermore, AP exams and the SAT follow a similar structure from a timing standpoint. Questions following a pace of about one question per minute contain content heavy texts which can at times overwhelm students. Time management and improved focus are skills that are mastered when pressured by the SAT timer.
While differing in subject matter and topic, honing in the skills which the College Board deems important can aid students to academic success in their AP courses through repetition and practice.
