One student started early. One started late. Same class, same exam, very different outcomes.
Last year, I tutored two students who were taking the same AP class at different schools. Let’s call them Dale and Judy.
Judy started weekly tutoring early in the fall. We worked together on the content from class, preparing for tests, and linking everything to the official College Board AP test she eventually took in the spring. This was her first year taking AP classes, and though she started out feeling a bit intimidated and unsure of herself, she gradually gained a huge amount of confidence and momentum leading into her exam. Since she was able to master the content as we went, we were able to focus almost entirely on test-taking strategies by the time the AP test drew near.
Dale, on the other hand, signed up for just a handful of sessions in the weeks before the official test. He hadn’t been doing great in class, and his teacher hadn’t spent much time preparing them for what the actual AP test would look like. Dale thought he’d come in to quickly brush up, but found himself overwhelmed by a sudden confrontation with the structure of a test he hadn’t even seen before, mixed with the discouraging recognition that he didn’t recall a lot of the content. We were able to get him feeling more prepared than he would have been otherwise, but there simply wasn’t enough time for a full and proper course correction.
Can you guess which student got a five on the test and which one didn’t?
Succeeding by Focusing on What You Can Control
This might seem like a morality tale, a fable of the ant and the grasshopper, where Judy, the ant, succeeded by planning ahead, and poor Dale, the frivolous grasshopper, just slacked and suffered the consequences. To a degree, that’s true. But there’s more to the story that reveals an uncomfortable truth: students don’t all get the same quality of teachers. Dale wasn’t incapable, unintelligent, or unmotivated. He was just unprepared. And by spending little or no time reviewing the actual AP test, his teacher didn’t even offer Dale the opportunity to realize how unprepared he was.
To a large extent, the teacher you get is simply luck of the draw. Back when I was taking AP US History in high school, I had a teacher who had just been hired, and he was not what you would call ideal. He mysteriously left class for long stretches, had us grade our own work without any oversight, and, most bizarrely of all, kept a framed picture of Chairman Mao on his desk, which he never explained or acknowledged. He was a nice, friendly, albeit strange guy, but he did not help us prepare for the AP test. As you can imagine, he only lasted a year in our school district, but that was my year, and I was forced to simply make the best of it.
In a perfect world, every AP teacher would be at the top of their game, teaching not only the content but the test, too. It’s far from a perfect world, but that doesn’t mean you have to be at the mercy of whatever luck you happen to have. That’s where supplementing your AP class with private tutoring comes in, especially starting early and maintaining a steady rhythm. And that goes for AP classes with good teachers, too: often there’s simply not enough time to cover everything in detail or give students the individual attention they need to excel, even with the best of intentions.
Why All the Fuss About APs?
With all the effort it takes to succeed in an AP class, it’s worth recalling why they're so important and how significant they can be for your college applications and experience.
For one thing, success in APs—both the classes and tests—makes your college applications shine. It shows that you chose to set a higher academic standard for yourself and met it. The higher your grades and scores, the more you can differentiate yourself in highly competitive and selective applicant pools. That can be especially advantageous if your APs relate directly to your intended college major if you already have one in mind.
The benefits only continue after you get accepted and start your college career. Lots of universities will allow you to skip intro course sequences with high AP scores. That not only lets you jump right into higher-level coursework, but can also significantly lower overall tuition costs, shortening your time to graduation and giving you more space to explore a minor, a double major, or internships.
In that sense, the time and money necessary to excel in your AP courses is an investment, and it can pay back major dividends, both academically and financially.
Smoothing Your College Transition with AP Success
I was lucky enough to go to a rigorous high school with lots of great AP offerings (that one AP US History teacher notwithstanding). That put me on track to graduate college comfortably in three years, before I even turned 21, with a major and minor. Not only that, it freed me up to take classes like Latin (even though I had my foreign language credits covered), History of Rock & Roll, and plenty of martial arts and guitar classes. It turned college into an enriching exploration rather than a stressful grind of intro-level prerequisites before I could even think about my major. It also saved a full year of tuition cost.
To be clear, I’m not showing off or suggesting I was a model high school student. I wasn’t. For example, I failed the AP Music Theory test spectacularly, especially the portion where I had to sing a written melody into a tape recorder in front of the proctor. I think I blacked out and went mute for that, and I still get a little panicked thinking about it. I was simply lucky enough to have great programs and mostly great AP teachers at my school, which was small enough that we students could get plenty of individual attention from instructors.
All the AP classes I took weren’t just window dressing to persuade admissions officers that I was ready for college. They actually made me ready. My junior year in high school was hard, with all those APs, sports, and college applications, but that challenge made my college career feel almost easy by comparison. And it made all the other transitions into college life, like living on my own for the first time, much more manageable.
Concluding Thoughts
When you feel prepared for the academic expectations of college, you’re able to embrace and enjoy higher education in a way you simply can’t if you're stressed and struggling to keep up. In that way, taking your AP classes and tests as seriously as possible—especially with the help of a professional tutor—is like giving your future self a gift that will most certainly be appreciated.
Want to explore of what AP tutoring with an expert looks like? Book a free consult to speak to a program advisor today.
