Staying up past midnight, stressing repeatedly during the week over managing exams, and spending entire weekends burning the midnight oil in preparation for the upcoming AP exams: all common occurrences of “AP week.” This time period consists of two weeks of College Board’s AP exams that students must take in a back to back schedule. 

The struggle is eminent when students are forced to spend hours daily in order to prepare for such multitudes of exams at once and even have to miss some of their other classes in order to take their AP exams.

“Some [drawbacks] are are you miss a lot of class time taking the exams and many students skip school afterwards,” junior Raghav Kannan said.

Time during weekends are also additional sacrifices that must be made in order to fully prepare for these AP exams. Such weekends leading up to AP exams consist of going through practice tests, flashcards, and making study guides in preparation.

“Apart from the prep we did in school, I dedicated the last three Saturdays to review material and to make study guides,” sophomore Sheena Anishraj said.

However, some have a difference in opinion when it comes to “AP week” as their few AP exams are more spaced out than that of upperclassmen. 

“AP Week is surprisingly better for me because it made me feel a bit relaxed as we had more flexible schedules and other teachers didn’t pile much work on us which allowed me to dedicate more time to studying,” Anishraj said.

Behind the actual test day itself, students have been studying in order to prepare for these exams for over a month. Such preparation is crucial before the exams as some of the AP exams do not fully correlate with the material focused on regularly in class.

“I think English classes, and the humanities AP classes might not prepare you as well for the exam because a majority of the AP Lang exam was writing. And we definitely could have done more writing in class,” Kannan

However, during this stressful time, student uncovered a variety of resources in order to be well-prepared for test day. Some of such resources were introduced by teachers such as Albert.io.

“AP Computer Science gave us access to [many resources] which had multiple choice questions that reviewed the learned content but in both classes specific review had to be done in our own time which was slightly frustrating,” Anishraj said.

Many agree that in the end all the hard work put in order to succeed in such exams pays off in the long run as often colleges give credit for succeeding in AP exams. AP exams can also help many be better prepared for college exams in the future.

“Some pros about AP exams is you can get college credits, get college credit for AP exams if you do well,” Kannan said.

To find out how to destress in order to cope with incoming exams and finals visit the link below!!! 

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