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Avoid AP Course Overload: It May Matter Less Than You Think
Why AP/IB classes may not be worth the added stress for you or your child
If you’re a parent reading this, perhaps you’re someone who is professionally and personally successful. Perhaps you’re someone who has a college degree and values it in your life. So, to see how important AP courses have been to your success in life, here is a test. Can you answer any of these three questions derived from practice tests for the Advanced Placement (AP) tests? Be honest. Do them without checking the Internet or getting help.
QUIZ
1. (AP Calculus) Find the value of x where the function
has a local maximum.
2. (AP U.S. History) Based on this passage from historian Robyn Muncy’s book “Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935,” published in 1991, who did women working in settlement houses such as Hull House initially seek to help?
“As the early years at Hull House show, female participation in that area of reform grew out of a set of needs and values peculiar to middle-class women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Settlement workers did not set out to become reformers. They were rather women trying to fulfill existing social expectations for self-sacrificing female service while at the same time satisfying their need for public recognition, authority, and independence. In the process of attempting to weave together a life of service and professional accomplishment, they became reformers as the wider world defined them.”
3. (AP Chemistry) Given the following reaction sequence:
2 NO2 → NO + NO3 (slow)
NO3 + CO → CO2 + NO2 (fast),
what is the form of the rate law for the entire reaction?
(Scroll to the end of the article for answers).
The AP Treadmill
Chances are very high you can’t answer any more than one of these questions. And yet you likely have a good career, a professional life, and accomplishments to your credit. So what’s the point of the AP treadmill, really?
The simple answer is this: in spite of the growth in the AP tests and their genuine value in some cases, they matter less than…
