AP World History: A Challenging Class for Freshmen

AP World History: A Challenging Class for Freshmen

Theodore Raitzer, Staff Writer

When freshmen who seriously want to academic challenge themselves start their secondary schooling, they have an important decision to make: AP World History or Honors Western Thought?

This is understandably a hard decision to make. On the curriculum guide, it says that the two classes are of similar vigor. But then, what makes AP and Honors different? AP World covers the beginning of civilization to near modern history. Honors Western Thought covers the Western perspective on topics from Art to Economics over time. Those who choose the AP course are generally woefully under-prepared for the workload because they expect it to be easy like their advanced classes from middle school. But factor in study time for tests, daily homework, class pacing, and the amount of material needed to be learned, and it’s suddenly all too much.

Luckily, the AP teachers are able to help the students by letting them do test corrections, redo many assignments, and only take off a small percent for late assignments. These breaks are very useful in allowing the student to get the grade they want. Without these, the class would be very hard to get an “A” in. The teachers do this because, according to Mr. Skidmore, “the difficulty of the course makes it almost a necessity”.

Really, the goal of the class is not to get an “A”, but to pass the AP exam in May. The exam tests students on all the material learned in the class over the course of the year. The exam, for those who do not know, can get the takers into better colleges and even allow them to skip college intro classes. This is beneficial as it lessens the cost of fees and allows students to take other classes that they would rather be taking. The test is structured into a multiple choice section and a writing section. Test takers can get scores up to a “5”, but that is very unlikely. While many colleges will accept a “3”, the very best universities will only accept a “5”.

The whole challenge is that this class is the first step into AP level courses. The freshmen taking this class have never taken one like it before. However, the teacher says that, “Learning from the course itself… is probably the biggest takeaway”. It helps prepare freshmen for AP Government and AP U.S History, and gets them comfortable working and thinking quickly. Skills like connecting themes to evidence and connecting those themes over time is very important.
In actuality, the class is hard, but not undoable. One of this year’s freshmen currently in it had felt “like it would be easy” when he first started the class. Similarly, students taking the class right now struggle with tests and many of them are not getting the grade they would like, but still think they will succeed. The teacher knows this, too, and wants them to “work through and struggle and learn from [their] mistakes…” so they can improve when taking further classes.