Editor’s Note: The following article is satire. It uses humor, exaggeration, and irony to comment on real topics and should not be interpreted as a factual news report or as representing the actual views of the publication.
Dear College Board,
We don’t hope this message finds you well. In fact, we hope your week has been as stressful and sleep deprived as the average Advancement Placement (AP) student’s in May — which is to say, very.
By now, you must be aware that millions of high school students are traumatized every year by having your evil army of AP courses imposed upon them. Are you aware of how many students’ sanity and joy are utterly destroyed by AP courses? Do you know how much students pay to study for — let alone take — the lousy AP exam in May?
You market the meaningless AP courses as “college-level learning” for students who want to reach a higher level. Well, the only levels you’re helping us reach are the lower ones of hell, and you don’t even bother to give us college credit — or our money back — if we don’t pass the ridiculous AP exam.
Don’t even get us started on the exam. AP students are given one chance to demonstrate our knowledge in one very specific way, and if we don’t conform to your silly idea of adequacy, all our suffering was for nothing.
“I think we need to put in a lot of work … to improve the level of questions that students are getting, where it’s not just rote memorization, but more about logical thinking or creative thinking,” said AP Computer Science teacher Ashley Ong.
The only things students truly master through AP exams are test-taking skills, rather than mastering the subject. It’s practically set up so that if students can’t master the process of elimination, they might as well have their airheaded baby cousin take it for them instead.
“A good majority of it is test-taking skills, particularly in the way the answers are set up and the questions are worded,” Ong said.
Guess what, College Board morons? Actually, we take that back — don’t strain your pea-sized brains trying to figure it out. We’ll just spell it out for you, just like how AP students are required to spell out their evidence in the free-response sections of our history exams. When you build the test to be massively unfair and luck-based, there rises a national population of angry, disrespected high school students whose hatred for the AP bosses burns brighter than magnesium on fire.
And while we’re on the topic, why are students required to analyze and provide context for every single piece of itty-bitty evidence in the free-response questions? When we write an essay about the negative effects of colonialism, why is it necessary to explain why racism is harmful? Quite frankly, it is absurd that we have to explain common sense to exam graders just because you don’t have any.
“They’re all sort of test-taking. Most people’s free responses involve of heavy writing skill and reading skill,” Ong said. “But it is heavily tested in classes that are not English comp [or] language comp, and that can be fairly difficult for showing off what students actually know.”
The AP exam is among the worst test-taking experiences known to mankind. When we are finished answering questions, we are still required to sit in silence and wait for the timer to run out. Why should we be required to sit in the room and marinate in our ineptitude, rethinking our life decisions as we stare at the review page? Haven’t we been through enough? Haven’t we already berated ourselves and had enough existential crises while answering the questions themselves?
You can’t even muster up the basic kindness to give us a swift and painless death. Scores aren’t released for two long, stressful months, stretching into what was supposed to be a relaxing summer. Students could have been in the Bahamas, getting a sweet tan, but instead, they’re hunched over their computers, waiting for the exam graders to tell them if they failed their exams.
What did the school bullies take away from you as children? What kind of nightmares did you have to endure in order for you to be evil enough to want to ruin every high schooler’s summer?
Don’t even think about telling students that College Board executives are working hard during those two months. You lounge around in your stuffed-up corporate offices while the poor, miserable exam graders hired to do your dirty work read all the garbage students like us had to invent for the stupid free-response questions.
As if it weren’t all the most pathetic crime in all of history, the torture isn’t even free! Oh, no. Students are required to fork over $100 out of their own wallets, and in returns all they get is the awful exam and a metric buttload of stress. With that money, we could have bought 36 12-packs of Ticonderoga pencils with the money we paid you greedy idiots, but we didn’t. That’s 432 pencils. Are you happy now?
“The cost is ridiculous,” Ong said. “The fact that costs have risen [while] the quality of the test hasn’t is very frustrating.”
According to Ong, the cost was once sensible when the exams were printed on paper and required shipping, security, and printing. However, now that the exam is digital and the costs of paper and printing are no longer necessary, Ong believes that the only valid reason for such high costs should be for website improvements.
“The fact that [the College Board has] digital tests and their website is very difficult to navigate, very hard to navigate, very hard for students to use, and consistently crashes a week or two before AP testing actually begins is the most frustrating thing,” Ong said. “They should be setting aside funds … to buy additional servers or manage additional servers during their peak operation times.”
Indeed, the College Board website remains an absolute mess. Are there even people who actually know how to make websites working for you? Because it doesn’t look like it. The monstrously slow, notoriously lag-ridden monstrosity of a website was probably the result of you College Board knuckleheads spilling some code onto their computer and calling it a day.
“The website is so bad. I shall not put it into words that are not school appropriate,” said Ong. “The website is terrible and also was not ready for the block schedule. Since APA was changed this year, they said they’d have all the resources up. I did submit that I was on the semester system. And they did not have any resources ready by the time we had taught them in fall semesters.”
It’s insane that the website takes half an hour to automatically grade multiple-choice progress checks. What could the algorithm possibly be doing that is more important than our studying?
Not to mention the abundance of spelling and grammatical errors in the progress check questions. The entire website is a dumpster fire failure. There is absolutely nothing good we have to say about it. It’s practically a miracle that it’s actually a standing website on the internet in the first place, considering how lame and inadequate it is.
AP courses are also a horror story for students of the semester block schedule like us.
“Block schedule is the worst for AP students,” Ong said. “Block schedule, regardless of what semester you take it in, you lose in some ways.”
Ong says she believes that AP courses, when combined with the semester block schedule, suppress any opportunity for students who were on the cusp of passing to fail the exams, further deepening an achievement gap because of the extra challenge they face.
“The students who didn’t study, well, they’re screwed if they took [the AP class] fall semester. The students who take it spring semester, well, it’s fresh in their minds. They just learned it,” Ong said. “But you have to keep up with spring semester. [Spring semester students are] going to fall behind, and they’re not gonna be ready for the exam because now they’ve run out of time.”
Last but certainly not least, the impact AP courses have upon high school culture stinks more than the dumpsters where we’re forced to put all our dreams of happiness into.
“I think there is a lot of unhealthy culture around the AP classes,” Ong said. “I think the most unhealthy part of that culture is the over-inflation of the importance of AP courses. There are other options that are not as well-presented to American students, because AP has become synonymous with American.”
By creating the opportunity for self-inflicted sleep deprivation and trauma, AP has turned high schoolers into an army of sheep who mindlessly shovel AP classes into their course loads just so they can have a chance to appear admirable and smart.
You know what gives us FOMO? Watching all our friends grind and achieve ungodly levels of eye bags, all in the name of college credit and enrichment. Thanks to AP courses and exams, students have managed to convince themselves that insanity is the new chic — we’re not even “unhinged.” Boy, we are desperately hanging onto the hinges by our fingernails.
We took AP Human Geography last year — a pointless course which boils down to where people live and why. Neither of us had even a sniff of interest in humans or geography, and we promptly forgot all course material over the summer. We’ve been happy ever since, because the entire course felt like a nightmare which rotted us from the inside out.
So why do high schoolers keep coming back to you? Well, for us, we thought it would help us look like galaxy-brain geniuses, that’s why. Even courses on subjects we were interested in, such as AP Chemistry, felt like they emphasized rigor over material.
Ong says she believes AP Computer Science should offer more opportunities for labs in the course material, as well as improve the quality of their labs.
“Their labs suck. Their labs are entirely superficial knowledge,” Ong said. “And that would be understandable for the beginning labs, but they don’t really have any interesting or intensive final project labs.”
You, College Board, bringers of hell, have created a society in which the young people glorify suffering in silence as long as the suffering gives them a fat GPA boost. If that doesn’t sound like something straight out of a dystopian horror novel, we don’t know what does.
In conclusion, you are the most malicious and evil force to ever burden the planet with your despicable footsteps, and we hope you have a terrible day.
From rock bottom,
Nam-Anh and Quinn.
