Best AP Exams for High Schoolers to Take
🚀 The task
As a high school senior who will be graduating in less than a month, I decided to look back on the many classes I took over the last four years. I realized that in my first couple years of high school, I struggled a lot to decide which classes would be best in my schedule without overburdening myself. So, today I will be ranking all the AP classes I’ve taken to help you in making those decisions!
I will be ranking based on two factors: time spent and value of the course.
⏳ Time rankings
I based these rankings primarily on how much time I spent on the class. Note that this could be very teacher-dependent. For example, my physics teacher tended not to give us very much homework and had generous curves in the class. I ended up not spending too much time on his classes, even though the Physics C classes are definitely quite hard compared to many other STEM AP classes.
A few specific notes:
- For AP chemistry, I self-studied for the exam instead of taking the course. Although I think there is definitely a lot of material and would be quite difficult regardless, not having a teacher to guide my studying could have made the experience even harder. Because the university I will be attending does not take the credit, I ended up dropping the exam after studying most of the material.
- I took AP Computer Science Principles, AP Statistics, and AP Calculus AB in my freshman year, when all classes and exams were online due to covid-19. Taking classes online gave me a lighter workload because teachers gave little homework. This may have impacted my relatively low ranking of the time spent on these classes?
🧠 Value Rankings
Other than taking an AP class “just because it’s an AP,” the other key benefit from taking these classes was of course the knowledge I learned! I found some classes particularly eye-opening while others were just.. dumb??
Again, this could be quite dependent on the teacher! Some notes:
- I felt that my AP World History class was really eye-opening for me because I had never learned world history in school and although there was a lot of content, I found it quite interesting. My teacher also definitely played a role in that!
- While in AP Computer Science A, I found that I didn’t learn much (because already knew the java language), this would 100% be a great intro-to-cs class because it immerses you in a language and you learn the fundamentals of programming!
- For the classes in the “didn’t learn that much” category, I feel that while the subject can be very deep and interesting, the AP class was just much to basic. For example, in statistics, the material is much less than many first-year college statistics courses.
📊 Conclusions
On the 11 exams I have taken so far, I scored 5 on all of them except for AP World History (which I got a 4). My favorite AP classes were Physics C: E/M, Calculus BC, and US Government. My least favorite were Computer Science Principles, US History, and English Literature.
Remember that there are so many factors that go into if a class is “easy” or not: past experience, natural understanding, effort from your teacher, etc. Still, I hope this helped you get a general overview on which courses might be best for you!
