relief

please let me now jump up and down while gleefully exclaiming AP EXAMS ARE DONE! AP EXAMS ARE DONE! over the course of a friday, monday, and wednesday i have taken three tests that determine exactly how well i have mastered the subjects of us history, biology, and english language and composition. it is the score i get on these tests that will determine if i receive college credit or get an exemption from introductory courses in college. my final grade in the class does not matter. are ap tests really a good way to determine if i have mastered the material?

if i would have been asked this question either two years ago or last year then i would say yes, yes they are a good way to determine my level of mastery for the material. this year, my answer has changed. i no longer feel that ap tests are a good way to measure how well i grasped the subject material. wanna know why? it's not because i found this year's tests to be excruciatingly hard, i actually found all three of them to be not bad so i'm not here complaining that they shouldn't count because i think that i failed them. i think they shouldn't count because i honestly don't really know the subject material very well for any of the ap tests i took. thankfully i was able to learn it somehow but i definitely didn't learn it from the books.

in my us history text book there are 31 chapters from early 1700s up through the presidency of george h bush. i read a total of three whole chapters: 29, 30 and 31. in my biology text book there are more chapters, more pages and more words and i don't think i read a single whole chapter. i read sections of chapters but never a whole chapter. then there's lang. there isn't a textbook that goes along with this class; it's nothing like biology or history. those classes are straight facts and biological life processes. lang is not. i went to class almost everyday and that's really the only way to prepare for that test. it's a reading comp test with a lot of analysis and some fancy terms thrown in. there's three essays and i feel like i answered two of them well but the second essay just wasn't good. it's the kind that i never scored well on when we practiced them in class too.

i never did extraordinarily well on tests in either biology or history but my thoughts after taking those tests were that i did well. especially on the history test- i found it to be easy. wait, what? an ap test, easy? how does that happen. the essays were very manageable and because it's over two days since i took the test i can freely talk about the essay topics. i wrote an essay about the relationship of the colonies and great britain. i didn't need to take ap us history to be able to write that essay, that's something i have been taught for years and years now. then i wrote an essay about the homefront of world war II in respect to japanese americans and african americans. i didn't expect essays like that to be on the test. i expected them to be more like the essays i chose not to write because those were tough. the rise of the republican party from 1820-1860? can't do that. didn't read my book.