What Are AP Courses?
AP stands for Advanced Placement, which can be translated as "(college) advanced placement courses" in Chinese. Like the SAT, it is a program run by the College Board. The purpose of AP is to provide high school students with an opportunity to experience introductory college-level courses during high school.
AP courses are some courses that can be taken in high school and are equivalent to introductory college-level courses.
The College Board has established AP subjects in 22 categories and 38 disciplines. However, this does not mean that every school offering AP courses needs to offer all of these subjects.
Each school can decide whether to offer AP courses and how many to offer based on its own circumstances. This is directly related to the quality of students and the availability of teaching staff.
Therefore, when evaluating a school's teaching strength, the number of AP courses it offers is also an assessment factor.
Theoretically, the more the better, but there are also some top private high schools that have their own systems and do not offer AP-level courses.
What Are AP Exams?
The AP exam is a standardized test organized by the College Board to assess the learning outcomes of AP courses. It is held once a year, and only once.
AP exams take place in May each year, generally starting from early May to mid-May. For subjects with scheduling conflicts, students can apply to take the exam at a later date.
Taking AP courses and taking AP exams are two separate things, because taking AP courses does not necessarily require taking the AP exam; students are free to choose. Similarly, taking the AP exam does not require having taken an AP course; one can prepare independently. Therefore, AP exams are completely independent of the American high school curriculum.
AP exams are scored on a 5-point scale:
5 = Extremely well qualified
4 = Well qualified
3 = Qualified
2 = Possibly qualified
1 = No recommendation
A score of 3 is generally considered passing, but if used in U.S. college applications, you typically need at least a 4, with a 5 being even better.
Tips: Taking AP courses and taking AP exams are two separate things, because taking AP courses does not necessarily require taking the AP exam; students are free to choose. Similarly, taking the AP exam does not require having taken an AP course; one can prepare independently. Therefore, AP exams are completely independent of the American high school curriculum.
The Role of AP
1. The most direct proof of academic ability
The course levels in American high schools are set very strictly. It is not up to students to simply choose to take AP courses; there are many prerequisites.
Taking mathematics as an example, the sequence goes from Algebra 1, Algebra 2, to Precalculus, Calculus AB, and then Calculus BC. If you want to take Calculus BC, you must have achieved a certain score in either Calculus AB or Precalculus before you can enroll.
Therefore, from this perspective, if a student can reach the AP level in a particular subject, it indicates that the student has attained a certain level of academic proficiency in that subject.
2. Improve GPA
Whether AP exam scores can improve GPA class ranking is directly related to the method used by the student's high school to calculate GPA.
There are two ways to calculate GPA: weighted and unweighted.
In the weighted system, regular courses generally have a maximum of 4.0, honors courses have a maximum of 4.5, and AP courses have a maximum of 5.0. Thus, if you take AP courses and earn high grades, your GPA can exceed 4.0.
In the unweighted system, everything is on a 4.0 scale, which may seem to have no effect. However, it is important to know that when U.S. universities evaluate applications, they not only look at the scores but also at the specific subjects students have taken, and universities have their own methods for recalculating GPAs. So, no matter how you look at it, taking AP courses and AP exams will definitely benefit your application.
3. Earn college credit
Taking AP courses can save a significant amount of tuition and allow you to take higher-level courses or graduate early. At most universities, a score of 3 is enough to earn credit, but at top universities, at least a 4 is required, and often a 5 is necessary.
Some higher-ranked schools, especially most liberal arts colleges in the U.S., do not allow credit transfer, but you can skip introductory courses and directly take more advanced ones.
Even so, these students can often learn more knowledge for the same tuition.
The Significance of AP in College Applications
The role of AP scores is merely the icing on the cake!
The role of AP scores is merely the icing on the cake!
The role of AP scores is merely the icing on the cake!
The "foundation" is your usual in-school grades (GPA) and other abilities such as language proficiency (TOEFL, SAT, etc.). If your GPA and standardized test scores are solid, then taking a few AP courses to demonstrate your learning ability will naturally be helpful.
If you haven't even laid a solid foundation, blindly studying higher-level AP courses in such a situation is nothing more than putting the cart before the horse. It often wastes time and effort with half the desired results.
Additionally, for students already enrolled in IB and A-level programs, it is unnecessary to take AP courses in the same subjects, because the regular grades in IB and A-level are already sufficient to prove to universities that you have equivalent learning ability to AP.
AP course learning is more important than AP exam scores
By nature, AP courses are first-year college-level courses, and their difficulty far exceeds that of regular high school courses. Therefore, whether a student takes AP courses, how many they take, and so on, can all reflect the student's confidence and ability to challenge difficulties and themselves.
Note!! Compared to the one-time AP exam results, U.S. universities pay more attention to students' ongoing performance, that is, their learning in AP courses. And the reason universities value AP course grades in admissions is not directly reflected, but indirectly through the emphasis on students' GPA, which is heavily influenced by AP course grades.
The Best Way to Study AP Courses
Do not study AP courses entirely in Chinese
These problems currently exist in self-study and in some training institutions' teaching, where the entire class is conducted in Chinese, even including professional terminology. When choosing textbooks, do not select Chinese books as study materials. Although there are already AP Chinese textbooks on the market, regardless of their quality, this learning approach itself is inadvisable. On one hand, it is not conducive to the final AP exam; on the other hand, for a student who is about to study abroad, developing the habit of learning academic content in English is a fundamental requirement. Relying on a Chinese-based learning method does not help students develop a Western educational learning mindset.
Therefore, even if you do not yet have the ability to learn entirely in English, you should first ensure that professional terminology is in English, and then gradually increase the proportion of English in AP subject learning, upgrading from bilingual learning to pure English learning.
Do not seek short-term breakthroughs solely for the purpose of passing exams
Currently, some institutions teach AP using the same mindset as TOEFL or SAT training, helping students quickly pass exams. This purely exam-oriented approach to learning AP courses is inadvisable. The difficulty of AP is comparable to that of introductory university courses, and the entire learning process requires a certain accumulation of knowledge. Not to mention whether this purely exam-focused model yields good results in the end, even if you barely get a 3 and pass the exam, what you have learned is superficial and does not fully cover the AP exam outline. Such learning does not capture the essence of AP, and the subsequent problem is: when you need to study higher-level courses in college, you will find a severe disconnect in knowledge. It will be very strenuous to catch up then.
Use the textbooks recommended by the College Board more often
Try not to rely on AP exam prep books
There are many AP exam prep books on the market now, mainly from these three publishers: Barron's, Princeton Review, and Kaplan. The problem with these prep books is that they do not fully cover the syllabus and exam points, and they also contain many errors that can mislead students. During the learning process, it is recommended that students use the AP textbooks recommended by the College Board. For example, for physics, you can use Giancoli, and for economics, Krugman, etc. Although these books may seem thicker than prep books, you will find they are not difficult to read carefully. The knowledge points are explained in an easy-to-understand way that achieves far better results than prep books.
