Advanced Placement classes are something that students are constantly encouraged to take by their peers, guidance counselors, teachers, and parents. AP courses claim to be "college level courses" that will make those high school students who take them more prepared for college than those who don't. If you are a good to excellent student, it is considered to be almost sinful to not take at least one AP class throughout your high school career, and it can be an incredibly stressful experience. Having taken four AP classes throughout my high school career and just begun my second semester of college, I can say with confidence that my AP classes made me less prepared for college than classes without the "AP" title.
As a writing major, I am going to use my AP language and literature classes for the main example. These classes also happened to be the most flawed in execution of all the AP classes that my school offered. The defining trait of AP English courses is that during the exam, students have to write 3 essays in 2 hours, which are supposed to determine how well they write. When you break it down, the students have 40 minutes to write each essay, one of which an analysis of a outside text, which also takes time to read and analyze. This is not even close to a sufficient amount of time to write a quality essay. Period. Especially considering the fact that there aren't any breaks in between the writing of each essay, an extra layer of unnecessary stress is placed upon these students, making them perform far worse than they would without these incredulous restrictions. These restrictions cause students to write whatever they can on a page without even thinking much about it, it's basically a blob of "word vomit" that hardly makes sense. They pay more attention to finishing before the time is up than actually writing something of significance.
Due to these time restraints, almost the entire course is dedicated to preparing students to write these essays in such a condensed period of time, which helps in the exam situation, but not in the preparing for college part. I am in an advanced freshman writing course with a group of other AP students who got a 4 or above on either of the AP English exams, and upon entering the class, none of us knew how to write a proper essay. I'm not even exaggerating, when we got our first writing assignment, we were all incredibly perplexed because she didn't give us any instructions on how the essay should be set up. We didn't know what she wanted, so we all wrote the default, 5-paragraph, analytical structure that was engraved in our brains from our AP courses. We all struggled to hit the word limit and create something that actually sounded good while making sense. It was such a simple task that shouldn't have taken long, but 90 percent of us were up at ungodly hours trying to create the perfect 5 paragraph essay. Going into class the day the assignment was due, my fellow students and I were bursting with questions about the prompt and her expectations of us. All she wanted was an essay that responded to the reading without analyzing it. None of us understood how that was possible. We were never taught how to use a text to emphasize our own ideas. All we knew was how to tear a text apart, limb by limb until we has analyzed it into oblivion. Our ideas and how to use outside sources to enhance ideas were never taught, and in college, that's far more important.
I'm not necessarily saying that the teachers behind the Advanced Placement classes are bad. My AP teachers were actually some of my favorites throughout high school, and I continue to have tremendous amounts of respect for all of them. They aren't the issue, the system itself is. Our education system is in an incredibly poor state as of now, especially in public schools. AP classes are meant to be the highest, most coveted course load you can attain, in claiming to be "college level classes." However, now that I am in college, these classes did not even remotely prepare me for my classes. I know I am not alone. This is a topic we should be talking about, not brushing under the carpet. Throughout my entire high school career, I recognized Advanced Placement classes as challenging classes that are specifically designed to prepare you for college. But they don't, they prepare you for the exam.
We should be recognizing the AP system as flawed in execution. We should not be pretending it's good the way it is because there is more at stake here. The students currently going through this system aren't really learning. They won't remember any valuable information after the exam, they won't be more prepared for college, but at least they passed a $90 test, right?
