Being a 10th grader is a time of a lot of decisions. Especially in NOVA International Schools. Students are faced with many choices and most of them are decisions of a life time. I know all these things because I encountered the exact same dilemmas when I was a 10th grader.
Should I take the AP or IB? Should I take any program at all? How is that going to help me in life? Is it worth going through the whole thing? Where do I want do study? Why? Who? How? And many more questions were giving me headaches day and night. Therefore, I decided to give you an overview of what I chose and to describe to you the “ordinary” life of an AP student.
First of all, some of you might be even wondering what is AP?
AP stands for Advanced Placement and it relates to courses set at college—level, especially designed for high school students by the College Board. Why would College Board do such a thing?
The process of admission and studying in college is a very lengthy and complex one. Students that take the AP courses go through an examination in May in order to earn credit for the AP courses they took.
The AP exams are graded on a different scale than the ones we are all familiar with, the highest grade being 5, which means extremely qualified; 4 is well qualified; 3 is qualified; 2 means possibly qualified and 1, which means no recommendation. In order for students to get a college credit by most colleges they should strive to score between 3 and 5, although some universities give credit to students that got 2. When students get to college if they earn a credit, they might be exempted from taking that course again. Students that want to get an international recognition and still don’t really know where they want to pursue their further studies can go for the AP diploma. The APID, as they call it, has some requirements that have to be fulfilled, such as choosing at least 5 subjects from different areas. Students should have 2 credits from languages (English or other world languages), 1 credit from the subjects that offer global perspective, such as World History, Human Geography and Government and Politics: Comparative, 1 credit from the Natural sciences (where a wide range of subjects from Biology, Physics, Chemistry to Calculus and Computer Sciences are offered), 1 or 2 additional subjects from the ones previously mentioned and from the groups of Social sciences and History as well as the Arts.
So, how does one ordinary day in the life of an 11th grader AP student looks like? Students usually take 2 to 3 AP courses per year, because they are very demanding and because we have an in-school restriction. In their first year they can take one language subject, such as English Language and Composition, which was introduced for the first time in our school this year and the class meets in the morning. Then students also take one of the subjects that offer a global perspective of the world or another social studies subject, for example Human Geography. The third subject they usually pick is a natural sciences one, for example AP Biology. The natural sciences courses are sometimes more demanding than the other AP courses, because besides the normal lectures in school, students are also required to do special labs. This might sound very complicated to someone who is not “natural sciences oriented”. But to the ones that plan to continue their education in the field of natural sciences, this is the perfect opportunity to gain experience in working in labs, doing various types of experiments and getting used to the “scientific” way of life. Students should do 12 common lab experiments in order to gain knowledge that they will demonstrate on the AP exam. I am going almost every week to the Faculty of Natural Sciences to do labs, which sometimes knows to be very time consuming.
Is this all a student needs in order to pass the AP program?
Well, not really. Students should also take the SAT exams, which include the SAT Reasoning Test and the SAT Subject Tests, which kind of go in pair with the AP program (they are not obligatory, but it’s recommendable to take them, especially for students who wish to study in the US). These two types of tests are usually required for admission on US Colleges, but they are also accepted in Europe as standardized tests.
But, that’s not all.
Students should also be involved in many activities even outside from school, such as sports, music, arts and anything else that involves creativity and makes a student stand out in the line of thousands and thousands applicants for college.
Of course, it’s not like the whole world of AP students should rotate around the AP program. They should be their own individuals, with different interests in their free time, social life filled with spending time with friends and family and having fun. Only like this a student can call oneself, a successful AP student ready for a college life and a lot of challenges that one would encounter.
So, is it worth it to go through all of this? I say it is. Because the opportunities that an AP student will have after one does well on the AP exams and receives credit for what one did, one’s life and one’s getting to college would be much more easier and many possibilities will be open to getting to some of the most prestigious colleges .
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