AP test season reflection

Wikimedia commons/Alton

AP testing season means kids around the world, like myself, get to experience the same unusual mix of emotions.

Caleb Hiatt, Sports Editor
May 17, 2021

For most students, the end of the school year is a cocktail of conflicting emotions mostly consisting of stress and relief. However, students involved in AP courses get a taste of this before the others. AP testing starts roughly three and a half weeks before the conclusion of the school year, so these students get the luxury of enjoying this time off from school work. As a student who got to take his first real AP tests this year, I have had first-hand experience with this terribly wonderful time of year. I have also noticed that there have been some common trends throughout the preparation and finalization of my AP tests. This process has been divided into these five stages:

  1. Stressed over too much or too hard of a review:
    Teachers typically assign what I would consider a necessary amount of work for review, but with other classes going on too, it gets to feel like a lot. On top of that, the reviews are often very challenging in order to prepare students for a difficult exam, but at times it made me feel like I was underprepared.
  2. Studying and eventually feeling ready:
    All of a sudden, during some last-minute cramming for the AP Physics exam, I felt like I was ready for whatever the test could throw at me, and just like that all my anxiety turned into excitement.
  3. Nervous again:
    Waiting outside the testing room brought back all the nerves that I thought had disappeared the night before. Thoughts of panic filled my mind as I worried about the difficulty of the questions and/or prompts.
  4. Realizing the test is not as bad as I thought:
    After starting the test, I realized my irrational fear of overly complicated questions was just that: irrational. I ran into the occasional difficult question, but they never matched my previous expectations.
  5. Pure relief:
    Few feelings beat that of hearing the proctor say “you are dismissed” after a marathon of testing, and more significantly, a whole year of hard work. These words remind me that I have nothing else to worry about whenever I step back into that class for the rest of the year.