Sophomore year (2nd year) I took AP European History and AP English Language and Composition. This English class is about analyzing rhetorical devices and literary devices and how they affect the reader. We read a lot of speeches, letters, and novels. However, we do not discuss themes in this class; rather, we discuss how the language of a text conveys the meaning or purpose of a text. It’s a very analytical class and most of us hated it. However, it’s
considered the easier of the two AP English classes because there is less freedom in the analysis. Once we learn a certain way to analyze a text, we can apply it to pretty much every text.
Junior year (3rd year) I took AP Chemistry, AP Calculus AB (Calc 1), AP US History, and AP English Literature and Composition. This English class focuses on themes of novels and plays and we had a lot more freedom to analyze texts the way we saw fit, as long as we could find proof in the text to support our analysis. AP Chemistry, as with most of the big AP science classes, was horrible. My school has horrible science teachers in general, but AP Chemistry is known to be one of the most difficult AP classes. Senior year (4th year) I took AP Calculus BC (Calc 2), AP Chinese, AP Physics C: Mechanics,
AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism, and AP Statistics. On a scale from 0-5, I received 5s on all of my AP exams except for the two physics exams,
which I received a 4 for both. I took quite a lot of AP classes, but for students applying to top universities such as Harvard etc, this is quite common. There are also a few AP classes that are considered to be easy as well, so it’s not unheard of for students to take even more AP classes than myself. However, even students attending MIT or Caltech don’t always get 5s because AP scores are largely dependent on how well your teacher prepared you. A lot of smart students I know get 3s on English or History exams, etc. Each year the difficulty of the AP exam can change as well. Here’s how I rank the difficulty of AP Classes at school versus how difficult I thought the exam was. When I say “same as the class,” the AP exam felt just like taking another exam in class.
Preparation Level Class Difficulty Exam Difficulty European History Excellent Very time consuming Same as the class English Language Ok Medium Same as the class English Literature Ok Medium Same as the class Chemistry Poor Hard HARD Calculus AB Excellent Easy but must study! Easy Calculus BC Excellent Easy but must study! Easy US History Poor Easy EASY Physics C Ok/poor Hard HARD Statistics Excellent Easy EASY/same as class
My School/Teachers
My school has a lovely campus. My high school campus is very large and very spread out. The white buildings to the left house most of the classrooms. This outside area is like the center of campus. We have a lot of benches for students to relax in. Since it’s always warm in Florida, students like to sit out here during free periods. To the right of these pictures is a big lake surrounded by grass. We have to walk through the grass to get to our Science Building, where all of our science classes are. You can see images of the whole campus and lake here.
These are my AP English and AP Calculus BC teachers. This picture was taken a few minutes before my senior year English class. The atmosphere in most senior classes is very laid-back and relaxed since the teachers know the seniors will be graduating soon. This is a classroom in a brand new building my school opened up. All of the desks have wheels so that we can move them to work in groups or rearrange ourselves however we like.
While the seniors enjoy and appreciate the laidback environment, sometimes the younger students take advantage of our teachers’ kindness. To the right is a picture from my AP Calculus BC class. We move the desks together and sit in 2 large groups so that we can work together on example problems. We don’t take notes that often, our teacher does a few example problems on the board and then we also do some example problems on the board together. Most students have their phones on their desk, but they don’t use them during class out of respect for the teacher. A freshman (first year) student in my math class took this picture to the right and sent it to some friends during class. He got in trouble after. 
My math teacher again! At the end of the year he made up fake awards and gave them out to students. I got an award for my mom’s cookies.
Some AP classes don’t lend well to the relaxed group-work style. AP Statistics was an entirely lecture-based class. Every class would just be 90 minutes of my teacher talking non-stop. This was my best friend every class.
Even though our classes seem very laid-back, we did get prepared quite well for the Math and English exams. Physics was also a quite laid-back environment, but we weren’t prepared well enough for the exam. Chemistry class was also very loose and had little structure, and many students felt like we weren’t prepared for the exam at all. For the harder classes, a more structured environment may work better.