Over the past two weeks, Advanced Placement (AP) exams, assessments issued by the College Board for potential college credit, were administered on campus. While Andover is not an “AP school,” meaning it does not follow the AP College Board curriculum, it does teach three specific APs: AB Calculus, BC Calculus, and Statistics. Nonetheless, many students sign up for exams across a variety of disciplines.
Philip Meng ’26:
I signed up for Physics C: Mechanics, Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism, and Computer Science A. I’m only taking Computer Science A. I had initially signed up for all three because I thought it more of an option than anything. If I had enough time to prepare for those exams, I would take all of them, but my spring term course load has been higher than I expected, so I’ll probably only take Computer Science A because I’ve already learned that material on my own, and it also provides me with credit for college.
Grace Zheng ’28:
I think [the school] provides adequate information about [APs] going in. My one complaint is the small desks. So many people’s laptops fell off. The desks were way too small. Especially for AP Chemistry. There were so many papers, and they were falling off my desk. And my pencils kept rolling off. It was distracting. I wouldn’t say it made too much of a difference, but it’s a convenience thing. Maybe I could have saved a bit more time, because you use the reference sheet and your calculator [a lot]. It was annoying to have everything out of place and stuff falling off.
Kaya Mangani ’27:
I wanted to take [AP French] to see what I would get. If I didn’t do well, I knew that I could always retake it again the following year. So I told my French teacher last year, Mr. Hughes when I was in French 304, that I was taking the exam and he had experience previously grading exams, so he offered to grade some of my sample responses. So if you go on the AP website, they have past years’ exams. So I did some of those and then I sent them to him and then he graded them for me and gave me feedback.
Natalie Giancola ’28:
[CHI520] wasn’t really designed to prepare us for the AP. I would say that it’s AP level, and that when I was doing my self-study, I found that there was a lot of overlap, but it wasn’t designed for the AP test. I had to do a lot of self-study. It was fun because a lot of the people who were taking the AP were in my dorm. We had quite a few late night study sessions together, especially the night before the exam. It was a little bit chaotic. It involved me falling off my chair at around 10:50 p.m. So that was great. I would say it was pretty fun. It definitely helped alleviate some of the stress too.
Woojin Oh ’29:
I took AP BC Calculus [after taking] MTH595 with Mr. DoBa. I feel like the AP test was actually easier than our in-class test. Shout out to Mr. DoBa for the good prep. We took two mock AP tests, which were actually part of the grade. We also had a full one to two weeks of just Mr. DoBa giving us mock AP exam material, like practice quizzes and practice tests to do in our own free time. Honestly, [the exam] was so much easier than the content that we were doing in class, so I felt pretty comfortable.
Nathan Chun ’28:
I have taken French and BC Calculus, and I attempted to take Chemistry, but ran into some technical difficulties. There was some sort of issue on my laptop that was interfering with the Wi-Fi connection, and no one really figured out what it was. It could have been a Virtual Private Network or something, but I ended up bringing a different device for testing. I’m taking it during the late testing date… It speaks to the credibility of our curriculum that we don’t need to use AP tests to the same degree or rely on them to the same degree.
Editor’s Note: Philip Meng was a business manager for The Phillipan Vol. CXLVIII.
