“Challenging” an AP exam (taking exam without having had the AP class) — is this common and how realistic is it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do students ever take an AP exam for which they have never had a class, but just try to self study? For example, if they have not had a psychology class, but do a lot of self study, is it realistic to think that they could score well on the Psych AP exam?

My daughter got a 5 on CS A without ever taking a programming class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My high schooler is telling me that some students are challenging AP exams, which means they take a test without having taken the AP class. My understanding is this is happening with a handful of exams for which the school doesn’t offer that AP class, but students want to try to see if they can still score well on the exam.

Has anyone had a child do this?

Almost all of the AP tests are easily crammable (to get a 5) if you have a smart kid that is good with memorizing things. Seriously, the AP curriculum needs to either be corrected or half of the courses/tests should be eliminated or renamed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My high schooler is telling me that some students are challenging AP exams, which means they take a test without having taken the AP class. My understanding is this is happening with a handful of exams for which the school doesn’t offer that AP class, but students want to try to see if they can still score well on the exam.

Has anyone had a child do this?

Almost all of the AP tests are easily crammable (to get a 5) if you have a smart kid that is good with memorizing things. Seriously, the AP curriculum needs to either be corrected or half of the courses/tests should be eliminated or renamed.

Please don't believe this person. The hard APs (Chem, Bio, Physics C, both Calc, US History, World History, Government and others) need months of intensive study. The AP Computer Science Principles has a project that's done before the day of the exam. The Art AP needs a portfolio, I believe. The number of APs that someone can just rapidly cram and do well on are few and far between. I'm going to say that they don't exist. The average kid needs to study for all of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My high schooler is telling me that some students are challenging AP exams, which means they take a test without having taken the AP class. My understanding is this is happening with a handful of exams for which the school doesn’t offer that AP class, but students want to try to see if they can still score well on the exam.

Has anyone had a child do this?

Almost all of the AP tests are easily crammable (to get a 5) if you have a smart kid that is good with memorizing things. Seriously, the AP curriculum needs to either be corrected or half of the courses/tests should be eliminated or renamed.

Please don't believe this person. The hard APs (Chem, Bio, Physics C, both Calc, US History, World History, Government and others) need months of intensive study. The AP Computer Science Principles has a project that's done before the day of the exam. The Art AP needs a portfolio, I believe. The number of APs that someone can just rapidly cram and do well on are few and far between. I'm going to say that they don't exist. The average kid needs to study for all of them.

Observe the above bolded words. If you don't know, you don't know. But months of intensive study? Kids take 2-4 of these "difficult" classes at the same time so do they need months-s-s-s of intensive study? If your kid is struggling like this, they shouldn't be taking the class. Or, as I suggested, the curriculum needs to be reformed or eliminated. If they just added a score of 6 to the test where only some small fraction could score, or made a bell curve out of scores 1-10 with normal standard deviations, then this wouldn't be a problem. However if 10-25% of kids can score a 5 (which only requires a 70% on the test), then yes, most of the tests are easily crammable. Or do you really think that so many kids are struggling to do well in school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My high schooler is telling me that some students are challenging AP exams, which means they take a test without having taken the AP class. My understanding is this is happening with a handful of exams for which the school doesn’t offer that AP class, but students want to try to see if they can still score well on the exam.

Has anyone had a child do this?

Almost all of the AP tests are easily crammable (to get a 5) if you have a smart kid that is good with memorizing things. Seriously, the AP curriculum needs to either be corrected or half of the courses/tests should be eliminated or renamed.

Please don't believe this person. The hard APs (Chem, Bio, Physics C, both Calc, US History, World History, Government and others) need months of intensive study. The AP Computer Science Principles has a project that's done before the day of the exam. The Art AP needs a portfolio, I believe. The number of APs that someone can just rapidly cram and do well on are few and far between. I'm going to say that they don't exist. The average kid needs to study for all of them.

Observe the above bolded words. If you don't know, you don't know. But months of intensive study? Kids take 2-4 of these "difficult" classes at the same time so do they need months-s-s-s of intensive study? If your kid is struggling like this, they shouldn't be taking the class. Or, as I suggested, the curriculum needs to be reformed or eliminated. If they just added a score of 6 to the test where only some small fraction could score, or made a bell curve out of scores 1-10 with normal standard deviations, then this wouldn't be a problem. However if 10-25% of kids can score a 5 (which only requires a 70% on the test), then yes, most of the tests are easily crammable. Or do you really think that so many kids are struggling to do well in school?

PP you replied to. My son, now in college, took a dozen APs and my daughter is on her way to taking about 14. Yes, it takes months of intensive study to get a 5 on the hardest AP courses. As a matter of fact, I do know. I saw/see my kids study. You seem to be confusing "content difficulty" with "work". Depending on each student's intellectual propensities, some content might indeed be difficult to understand. But the work involved, even if the content is easy to grasp, will never be nil, or close to nil. Most AP exams do involve knowledge of the subject matter and memorization of same. That is WORK. You can't just wing it and you should stop spreading disinformation to that effect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My high schooler is telling me that some students are challenging AP exams, which means they take a test without having taken the AP class. My understanding is this is happening with a handful of exams for which the school doesn’t offer that AP class, but students want to try to see if they can still score well on the exam.

Has anyone had a child do this?

Almost all of the AP tests are easily crammable (to get a 5) if you have a smart kid that is good with memorizing things. Seriously, the AP curriculum needs to either be corrected or half of the courses/tests should be eliminated or renamed.

Please don't believe this person. The hard APs (Chem, Bio, Physics C, both Calc, US History, World History, Government and others) need months of intensive study. The AP Computer Science Principles has a project that's done before the day of the exam. The Art AP needs a portfolio, I believe. The number of APs that someone can just rapidly cram and do well on are few and far between. I'm going to say that they don't exist. The average kid needs to study for all of them.

Observe the above bolded words. If you don't know, you don't know. But months of intensive study? Kids take 2-4 of these "difficult" classes at the same time so do they need months-s-s-s of intensive study? If your kid is struggling like this, they shouldn't be taking the class. Or, as I suggested, the curriculum needs to be reformed or eliminated. If they just added a score of 6 to the test where only some small fraction could score, or made a bell curve out of scores 1-10 with normal standard deviations, then this wouldn't be a problem. However if 10-25% of kids can score a 5 (which only requires a 70% on the test), then yes, most of the tests are easily crammable. Or do you really think that so many kids are struggling to do well in school?

PP you replied to. My son, now in college, took a dozen APs and my daughter is on her way to taking about 14. Yes, it takes months of intensive study to get a 5 on the hardest AP courses. As a matter of fact, I do know. I saw/see my kids study. You seem to be confusing "content difficulty" with "work". Depending on each student's intellectual propensities, some content might indeed be difficult to understand. But the work involved, even if the content is easy to grasp, will never be nil, or close to nil. Most AP exams do involve knowledge of the subject matter and memorization of same. That is WORK. You can't just wing it and you should stop spreading disinformation to that effect.

This is my last response to this because there's no point in continuing the argument. I thought my original comment included the population of kids where cramming is very possible, and it's not a small number. In the second, I thought I gave the reasons why. Now, wrt the number of AP tests that your kids took, its commendable they took so many. I always think more is better because the high school curriculum is so watered down.

The actual AP classes that kids take from a specific teacher at a particular school, and how much work is assigned, can't be argued because that's subjective. Its also the reason why some people do poor in the class and get a 5 and some others get a good grade in the class and get a 3.

However, it's not hard to get to a large number of AP classes/tests in some circumstances. For example, at our slightly above average school, it's pretty normal for at least half the kids to take 5 (plus a FL, so 6) of the hard AP classes (you originally listed as the hardest ones) as their regular sequence. To accelerate would mean to just take them a year or two earlier and do DE, take an elective AP class, or take a free block later. If you throw in any combination of Precalc, AB, Psych, the easy physics, CS principles, Stats, Human Geo, AA Studies, the Econs, another Bio/Chem/Physics C, etc., you can easily get to double digits in number of AP tests at our school without adding that much more rigor (while increasing wGPA), although a few of those classes aren't offered but the test can be taken at another school. ymmv

[Anonymous]

I took 6 AP exams. Three (English, statistics and calc BC) were taken at school through the offered class. The other 3 (Spanish, Chem and biology) I set up myself because either the class wasn't offered or the teacher was discouraging us from taking it (Spanish, and the teacher ended up fired.) Those three were slmost all self study.
The school was zero help in scheduling the exams and my parents didn't even know what I was doing. They refused to pay the exam fees! I paid them out of my own earnings.

[Anonymous]

I think it sort of depends on what you want out of them.

I think many kids that have figured out their career path may easily pass one or more of their AP courses. EG I was way, way, waaay ahead in CS. However, most colleges will make you take those courses in your discipline anyway. No, I didn't need much if any additional studying here.

I managed to klep out of all of my poly sci/humanities requirements, but I took the courses and wouldn't have otherwise cared. The tests were just essays.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for the replies. DC is at a small school that offers just a handful of APs. DC had had regular chemistry but not AP (because it is not available). DC is thinking about sitting for the exam to try it. The school will provide the test to them so finding a place is not a problem. This is helpful to know that others have tried this.[/

AP Chemistry would take some effort; your high school, first year Chem is unlikely to have covered the same content.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do students ever take an AP exam for which they have never had a class, but just try to self study? For example, if they have not had a psychology class, but do a lot of self study, is it realistic to think that they could score well on the Psych AP exam?

Dunno if I posted already, but I not only did not take the class, but studied for the wrong exam in 10th grade (forgot what I signed up for). I thought I was doing World History, but it was European. Still got a 4. Took International Government cold as as senior, and got a 5. I was freakishly well-read, though, and far too ADHD to have been able to replicate this in something that required the discipline to sit down and work through the exercises in order to really understand the subject (Music Theory, Calculus, Physics, etc.)

I just googled for free AP psych multiple choice questions and scored 5/6, because I forgot which drug category was for schizophrenics. Thanks for your help, Oliver Sacks. Anyway, that one probably isn't too hard to tackle for a bright student who reads through the material.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is fairly common at private schools that don't offer AP classes.

That would mean the student took classes but they weren’t called AP. Same info taught

[Anonymous]

My son took and did well on the AP CS A exam without having taken the class, but he was the programming lead for his robotics team. He didn't learn the material just by self study, he knew it from years of robotics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You mean they're self-studying?

Overall this isn't very common, with exceptions. It's more common in MCPS STEM magnets, because they don't teach to AP standards. They have their own, high-caliber courses. Since college admissions is an arms race, students there also try to self-study for APs and take AP exams by themselves.

My kid is in a regular MCPS high school, and her AP Physics C teacher is abysmal. We hired a tutor and she's getting through the first part, Mechanics, and doing OK. But the second AP exam associated with that course, Electricity and Magnetism, will essentially be taken as self-study, because at the rate the teacher's going, he's not going to get to the second part of the course in any meaningful way before the exams in May.

For languages APs, bilingual or bicultural kids sometimes take the AP exams without the corresponding MCPS course, but they may take prep courses on their own, or self-study, or have weekend language classes. Mine have the latter. Every Saturday they go to their native language school. They take a different language during the week in MCPS.

Sorry to hijack---I thought Mechanics was a year long class and E&M was also a year long class. Are they each only a semester?

It's like calculus - some schools have AB one year followed by a year of BC-only content, some have both in one year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And no, you cannot take an AP exam without preparation or background knowledge and hope to do well on it.

Self-study can work well.

That counts as preparation, obviously

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for the replies. DC is at a small school that offers just a handful of APs. DC had had regular chemistry but not AP (because it is not available). DC is thinking about sitting for the exam to try it. The school will provide the test to them so finding a place is not a problem. This is helpful to know that others have tried this.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVqkjsKI25jyakiVhTrQhESUKg1eOsSsL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLmtMZsGcmFlsGaBrpjdEWW55Vc84XA1Jc

Get an AP chem review book as well.