With AP exams ending a month before school does, many people question what the point is.
With having to learn all the AP curriculum before the AP tests, it gives students the opportunity to apply the curriculum they learned throughout the year.
“We need to teach all of our content that the assessments care about, six weeks before we’re done with school. So in the six weeks, I want to do projects that relate to the content, given that we already had to teach everything that the College Board cares about,” history teacher Micheal Vereb said.
AP History teachers Vereb and Matthew Poth gave their students end of the year projects that help students understand how to apply history concepts.
“Now that AP tests are over I think it’s really important for students to take what they learned and apply it to real word applications,” Poth said.
While they both like the extra time to give these projects, Vereb believes it would be more beneficial to have exams at the end of the year.
“AP is great for college credit and all of this stuff. Our accountability to them is in 80% of our school year. So we have 80% of the time to teach 100% of the content that any accreditation group cares about,” Vereb said. “I’d like to have 100% of the time to teach 100% of the content instead, and I think that would be more fruitful.”
Similarly, Ashley Taylor, AP Psychology and African American human studies teacher is giving her students projects but for additional reasons.
“It’s just a way to relax our brains and then also connect to what we’re learning,” Taylor said.
Many people agree that giving students easier projects as a way to relax after the test is the best way to learn.
“I think after exams, we should be a little more relaxed but I feel like most of my classes are kind of winding down now and we’re not doing as much heavy material,” junior Sienna Dhillon said.
Many people believe that work after AP exams is unnecessary and doesn’t help.
“I feel like after AP exams, there’s really no point in being in my AP classes. Respectfully, I don’t think we should be going this far after SOLs and AP exams,” sophomore Harlie Reich said.
Many sophomores are in AP Precalculus and AP human Geography or AP US Government.
In AP Precalc, students are learning a unit of Calculus and in the AP History classes they are working on projects that apply what they learned.
“I feel like, at least in human geo, it’s kind of just busy work. And in AP pre cal we’ve already taken the exam so to be learning all new material right when schools are out is hard because no ones really interested in it,” sophomore Emerson Crowley said.
Similarly, many students understand why they have the work but also agree it’s unnecessary.
“It’s a wider range of knowledge that’s still important for the broad aspects of a subject but not closely related to the necessary curriculum, so I feel like it’s unnecessary,” sophomore Claire Hankins said.
That being said, there are several people who like the extra time for projects that apply the AP curriculum.
“We’re doing a lot of projects and a lot of research which I think is really interesting because it still gives us opportunities to learn without testing,” junior Kate Weller said.
