APs

I’m always wishing that I took more Advanced Placement™️ courses in high school. In Junior Year (the prime time to take them) I took nothing more than some PAP’s, basic stuff I had to knock off my grad plan, and Dual English.

I kick myself from time to time thinking back on how I didn’t take AP courses during the pandemic, which was essentially a perfect(ly gravely unfortunate) storm of events that led to school being easier for the most part. Learning was so breezy when I could do it through a screen, and I’ve squandered the opportunity.

To blame it on others would be foolish, but to be fair to myself I spent the entire pandemic online with my friend group, people who didn’t typically take APs. I didn’t think it strange at the time because I was pretty split off from the people I would’ve taken APs with. I digress. that’s the past.

Anyway, in terms of the bright blazing future, I’ve passed all of my AP tests, all five of them. From oldest to now: here’s very short blurbs on what I thought of the classes.

2020: AP U.S. History

My teacher was very lovely, and tried very hard to get us to read the textbooks. That’s the real secret, just make your students read the textbook and take notes.

I was allowed to type notes in Word with the very fair restriction of having my notes passed through Turnitin. The problem with that solution is that it meant I couldn’t read the book and type in what I read, I had to get incredibly childishly random with how I spelt and worded things. My teacher thought them funny, and reading back on them I think them immature.

Pages on pages of notes written by me at absurd hours of the night using the strangest syntax. My notes were the stuff of legend. People borrowed them for some reason, perhaps to laugh at them. I didn’t care though, the notes sure helped me. It’s all about getting the knowledge in your own brain, and writing events in my own silly little words really helped with that process.

Scored a 4.

2020: AP CS Principles

Breezy class. Language agnostic, but my school’s CS teacher taught the curriculum primarily through code.org, which used JS in a sort of sandbox. Very fun!

The trick for the final project thing was to study the rubric immensely. I followed that thing to the pixel, even looking back on previous years rubrics and publicly available work on the CollegBoard website. It gives you a general idea of what you can build, and I found there’s very few restrictions. Quite straightforward, don’t overthink it.

I still personally think my work warranted a 5, but alas, I scored a 4.

2022: AP Statistics

My AP Statistics teacher is a kind person, and other than the knowledge on how statistics are calculated, she was the only joy I got from this course. It should be renamed to AP Calculator and Reading About Statistics Tests+Confidence Intervals, because that’s about all it is.

Admittedly, I didn’t study much other than making notes over the entire year’s material in the two days leading up to the test. I’ve never lost confidence in myself during a standardized test before, and this test was the exception. I scored a 3.

My college doesn’t even have Statistics in the CS degree plan. I feel a fool. I’d take it again, though, at least for the knowledge and my teacher.

2022: AP CS A

Also breezy. Java was my least enjoyed language, and still is, but having prior knowledge of it and OOP in general helped immensely, as I could focus more on the more complex topics taught later on (boolean rules, sorting implementations.) My teacher was real swell and let me do other stuff and slack a bit as a result of this preexisting knowledge.

I’d recommend having your own laptop to bring and do work on. My school had computers and gave us OneDrive accounts, but writing and compiling code in the cloud was finnicky for a lot of people in my class, and I felt syncing work between home and school was a hassle.

Scored a 5! I thought it was more along the lines of a 4 minimum for sure during the test, and I’m quite pleased.

2022: AP Calc AB

My Calculus teacher was great. I actually can’t think much besides that, sadly. The concepts kinda just come to you. I will say, however, that u-substitution was the bane of me. The teacher was very proactive with giving and making us complete note packets, and I don’t think I can share them (and I don’t have the files, anyway.)

Memorize the Unit Circle, or at least the top right corner of it, and figure out how to translate that across the rest of it. I abused the ASAP trick till I got everything committed to memory.

I don’t have my score yet. I goofed a bit during the test and I’m praying to the skies above I get the score back soon-ish.

Fun classes, wish I took more.