<p>“AP tests don’t measure how smart you are.”</p>
<p>Not directly. The results on them are almost certainly highly correlated with how smart you are. Even strong correlations have outliers, so it is quite possible that we know someone mediocre who got a 5, or someone brilliant who got a 1. But in the aggregate…</p>
<p>“AP Tests measure how well you studied prior and how well you remember what you studied.”</p>
<p>…which is significantly easier when you are intelligent. However, AP tests (other than maybe the really easy ones like Human Geography or Psychology) are designed to test more than simple recall of information. They demand you be able to analyze it using skills learned through the curriculum, as well. </p>
<p>“After the test, you can forget everything (another good reason to take the freshman course)”</p>
<p>Just like you can forget everything after taking a college final. Although its unlikely you ‘forget everything’ - it is simply stored in your long-term memory that can be recalled much more easily when you review the material.</p>
<p>“You can become stupid within the next week”</p>
<p>No, you can’t, unless you suffer brain trauma. Intelligence is fairly stable throughout life. </p>
<p>"They’ll look at the number you got right and from that they’ll judge how smart you are. "</p>
<p>No, they won’t. They’ll judge how well you know the skills intended to be learned from the curriculum. </p>
<p>"It’s like vocab tests.</p>
<p>How many of those words can you honestly say you remember now even though you got 20/20 on the test.</p>
<p>I went through AP Spanish and a year later I couldn’t recall more than a handful of words. </p>
<p>Is everyone like this? No, but I’m sure more are than not."</p>
<p>Of course, because intelligence is distributed on a bell curve-like distribution. The vast majority of people lie in the middle. The smartest people compromise a small tail of the distribution (it’s not a tautology - the alternative is everyone being either really smart or really dumb, and few in between.)</p>