AP TESTING SEASON APPROACHES

BY LILY CHESBRO

As the end of the school year comes closer, the thoughts of AP exams and finals fill WHS and other high schools. Students face a lot of stress during this time: the thought of not doing well, not understanding the material, and the worry of failing an AP test that was paid for and could have an effect on college credit.

AP tests begin the first week of May and follow through the second week as well. All AP classes have different preparation built around it depending on the course and what is included in the tests.

Different teachers give example problems in order to prepare the students.

Mark Schoonover, English teacher at WHS, teaches the AP classes of Seminar and Research. These classes are a little different than the other AP courses offer because the students are physically completing the entire course the whole year rather than just taking a final at the end of the year.

These two courses cost 145 dollars to take the test, which for Seminar is different from Research. AP Seminar is primarily based around two different presentations and two different academic papers, that correlate with these presentations.

As these classes both have presentations, this could cause a lot of stress for students.

“I think a lot of it comes down to comfort and confidence in front of an audience, everybody for the most part has a little bit of stage fright, but the class is designed so that we try to build a good community so that people don’t feel uncomfortable talking to their classmates,” Schoonover said.

These classes are primarily writing and research based, and writing longer papers or essays than what a student is used to could be overwhelming.

“Doing prep work ahead of time, don’t think about writing a whole paper, think about writing one part of the paper,” Schoonover said. “Outlining and doing all of that pre-writing makes the writing process so much easier.”

The course is set up so the students are able to split the work up, and they aren’t trying to, for AP Research, for example, write an entire 4,000-5,000 word paper with no outlining or organizing.

The paper and presentation is the AP research “exam”, since there is no written test.

As for Seminar, there is an end of year exam.

“The two papers that we write for the exam are essentially small versions of the two larger ones you write to turn in for part of your portfolio,” Schoonover said.

These two classes are part of the AP Capstone and prepare students for college research and presenting.

AP Biology, another AP course offered at WHS, has a little bit of a different preparation than the two courses previously mentioned. Shelly Rohrer teaches this science class, and it is primarily focused on the MCQ’s (multiple choice questions), FRQ’s (free response questions), and SAQ’s (short answer questions) that mock the same style of questions that will be on the AP exam.

“It’s eight units of content that goes through what’s really supposed to be the first semester of a college biology class. Our textbooks are an entire year but the new content is really just about a half year, so a semester,” Rohrer said.

With this being a college level course there is a lot of material to cover just in a school year’s worth of time.

“We do what I call FRQ Friday, which is the free response questions. Then we do MCQ Mondays where the students do like real AP questions,” Rohrer said.

Having the students score well is a goal of Rohrer’s, so finding new things to help accomplish that have improved the scores.

AP uses specific words in questions called “task verbs.” These are words such as “identify,” “explain,” or “describe.” Knowing what these words mean in terms of how to go about answering the question could potentially help the students score higher.

“I would say that implementing the FRQ Friday has been really helpful. I think that the practice with the way the questions are worded, and there’s specific terms that are included in the FRQs that may mean different things like the word ‘identify’ means they literally just have to say one word,” Rohrer said.

These questions are mostly taken from previous year’s AP tests in order to get an accurate idea of what will be seen on the test in the beginning of May.

With such a heavy course load there is not a ton of time to review the year’s worth of material for the final exam.

“We do not review in the class. I know that there are some AP classes that spend the last couple weeks or even the last grading period they review because they’re done with their content, but as of right now I have one day that we are not doing content,” Rohrer said.

2023 Ap Exam Schedule

May 1: US Gov and Politics -8AM

Chemistry-12PM

May 3:

May 2: Environmental Science-8AM

May 4: Seminar-12PM Statistics-12PM

Literature- 8AM May 10: Biology-12PM