"Light" and "Heavy" AP courses

Hamurtle
Mon, 27 Nov 2017 16:55:44 +0000

I would definitely add AP Chinese to the ‘lite’ or ‘joke’ AP classes. Son got a 5 on the test from everything he learned from Saturday Chinese school. He never took the class in school even though all of his Chinese friends tried to persuade him that it was an easy A.

He liked his AP US History and European History teachers although they prepared their students in different ways for the test. He felt better prepared for the writing sections for European History as his teacher gave them lots of writing assignments and graded pretty harshly. His APUSH teacher was very thorough in preparing students for the multiple choice but not so much with writing. He ended up with 5’s on both tests (an oddity as most Asian kids aren’t big into history).

His school is an anomaly where teachers who graded harshly generally prepared the students so well to a point where students who were getting a C+/B- ended up getting 4’s and 5’s on the Chemistry and Calc BC tests without any problem.

I don’t think his AP Bio teacher had more than a third of the class get A’s but close to 90% of the class got a 5 on the test and most of the kids ended up getting 750+ on the SAT 2 Biology exams.

My son never took APES but at his school it was considered AP lite in that most of the students taking the class were not the STEM kids (this is a Top-25 high school in CA).

Most kids in the school took AP Language and Compositon instead of AP Literature and Composition as they thought that Language was the easier of the 2 courses. Son took Literature and was surprised by the amount of writing they did. His teacher had them write essays every week using questions from old AP exams and every other week they had in-class essays. Son actually enjoyed English for the first time as his teacher was well respected in school and gave honest feedback on all writing assignments. The students also had a graded assignment where they spent 2 weeks writing Common App and UC application essays and the teacher would add her comments.

In the end it appeared that the Literature class ended up doing more writing than the Language class, but the students were well prepared and everyone ended up getting 5’s on the AP test.