Recently, many students have complained about the costliness of AP exams. Particularly for seniors, many of whom take as many as 4 or 5 AP courses, these exams are $89 apiece, and not always beneficial. Madison High School, like many schools, requires any student who enrolls in an AP class to take the AP exam in May. But should students who take multiple exams be given the option to opt-out of taking an AP exam? Perhaps these students could be given a final exam instead. Senior Daniela Cleary stated, “I think a lot of students take AP courses because they want to be in the class, not because they plan on using the credits in college. For example, I’m going into the sciences, but I am also in AP Literature. The school requires that we take the exams, so even if we have just been taking the class to learn the material, we have to pay a lot of money and sit for exams that won’t benefit us.” By May, many students know where they are going to college. And if a student’s college doesn’t accept a class’s AP credit, why should a student be forced to take the exam?
Other students who take AP classes may not necessarily be “qualified” to take the AP exam. While under-qualified students should be discouraged from overriding into AP classes in the first place, these individuals still feel pressured by today’s competitive academic society to take as many AP classes as possible. It is more practical for the less qualified students who take multiple AP classes to focus on two or three AP exams instead of five or six. Everyone has academic strengths and weaknesses. If this were the case, students could focus on the exams that they are most qualified for and earn a “4” or a “5” instead of several “3”s. According to their academic strengths and weaknesses, students could then devote their valuable study time to a few exams, instead of dividing it among five or six, only to do poorly on all of them.
Another senior, Zoe Buzinkai, noted that her school in Michigan did not require students to take AP exams. “Most people ended up taking the exams anyway, but it was nice to feel like you were studying for yourself, not because the school required you to take them,” she explained. Madison High School is not to blame, because most schools make AP exams mandatory. We are only following this trend, but perhaps the administration should reconsider this requirement.