To AP or Not to AP?: A Guide to River Dell’s AP Courses

Continued from Page 8 to receive 60 to 75 minutes of homework every night. Student sources suggest that the true amount of homework is far more variable. One student notes, “Homework in this class is almost always optional and generally takes less than an hour to complete. You might even find yourself not having homework on several days. There is more work when projects are assigned, although they aren’t assigned often. Studying for tests may also take a bit longer, but overall, the workload of the course is more than manageable.” This student warns, however, that students should not “…neglect the optional homework just because it’s optional. Poor study habits will cause weak understanding of the concepts, insufficient coding experience, and subsequently, low grades.”

Class Structure:

According to Dr. Chu, AP CSA class time roughly consists of “30% lecture, 60% hands on coding, 10% assessment.” Assessments consist of quizzes (25% of assessments), unit tests (60% of assessments), and projects and homework (15% of assessments). The course is divided into various units covered on the AP Exam, which are taught to students through class lectures and homework assignments, typically on a website called code.org. Each unit is concluded by a unit test consisting of multiplechoice questions and freeresponse (open-ended) questions that require written code.

This class provides students with basic proficiency in Java, some familiarity with Object Oriented Programming, and problemsolving skills necessary for coding. As a coding class, students who take this class should primarily seek to gain hands-on coding experience in Java.

Dr. Chu offers extra help on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. This class does not offer test retakes or extra credit assignments.

AP Test:

Like AP CSP students, Dr. Chu’s AP CSA students “…generally perform much better than New Jersey state averages, which have been much better than the national averages.” The AP CSA fi- nal exam consists of two sections: a multiple choice and free-response (open-ended) coding section. The multiple choice section includes 40 questions, and the free-response section contains four questions.

AP Chemistry Overview:

AP Chemistry is taught by Dr. McNamara. As it is an AP science class, the class is designated to two periods, and taking AP Chem means having the class on all rotation days. The class expands on what was taught in the previous sophomore chemistry classes to prepare for the AP exam. For students interested in pursuing STEM or medical related careers, the AP course provides an advantage by covering all of the topics taught in General Chemistry college classes.

Expectations:

It goes without saying that AP Chemistry is a class that requires motivation and selfstudy skills to succeed, especially as the course moves at a rapid pace of covering a topic a day. According to Dr. McNamara, it’s important to not just to be challenged, review concepts, and participate in class, but also work in an environment with others that requires teamwork to complete activities and labs (which don’t require full lab reports). Dr. McNamara also offers a variety of resources to review materials, such as practice problems, textbook readings, websites, and videos and she believes,“Wrong answers and ‘dumb’ questions provide excellent learning opportunities,” so don’t be afraid to ask questions!

To prepare for the class during the summer, Dr. McNamara assigns a partly optional review of the previous chemistry class the student took. She also offers virtual review sessions on Teams to go over them. Once the school year starts, Dr. McNamara recommends her students take thirty minutes a day to go over lessons, which helps them prepare for upcoming assessments and retain information better.

Class Structure:

Another aspect of Dr. McNamara’s class, which many students may appreciate, are the test retakes, which give students the opportunity to earn back half of their lost credit. Because “Students have to be able to master a great deal of material and then use that knowledge in a holistic way,” Dr. McNamara says she believes retakes are important “because I think it provides students a real opportunity to reexamine their understanding of the content and their approach to the question.” Moreover, for a better idea of what the tests look like, the “free response question may draw on knowledge from three or four different units. In addition, the questions themselves are often designed to test a student’s ability to read critically and decipher what the question is asking, what information given is essential, and what information is there to distract.”

The AP Test: Dr. McNamara’s teaching style is certainly paying off. Combined with students’ hard work, there was “an 87% pass rate (score of 3+) and 50% of the students scored a 4 or a 5” on the AP test during her first year teaching the course last year.

As the class is generally small-sized, Dr. McNamara shares that “everyone is welcome—so I really get to know my students and they get to know each other. There’s a great sense of teamwork and togetherness in our common goal.” While the class should be expected to be rigorous, it doesn’t go without fun.

AP Literature AP Literature is taught by Mrs. Vogt. In the classroom, students learn how to evaluate, analyze, create, and support claims based off a variety of media, including fictional novels, poetry, and drama. Students also debate these works in class with thought-provoking and meaningful discussions. According to Mrs. Vogt, a student’s writing should “… make an argument, and then you illuminate your argument… you’re bringing it to light.”

Some skills essential to AP Literature include close reading, identification and interpretation of literary techniques, and analyzing arguments. Students receive a first taste of this during the summer assignment, which is comprised of reading and taking notes on The Great Gatsby and writing respons- es to two poems.

As students begin the school year analyzing and discussing a wide array of literature, there is the freedom of making an argument and then bringing it to life. Students learn to go deeper and make advanced connections, such as how an author’s life during a certain time period affected the literature they wrote. As the year progresses, students thus gain an advanced understanding of the author’s perspective, identifying and analyzing the literature, and crafting a thesis that not only is unique, but one which can be connected to the current world. Mrs. Vogt especially values that even though, “I could tell you what happens in the book, and I can tell you important things that happen… what I really want you to do is to see all these things for yourself and have something to say.”

Mrs. Vogt’s class consists of reading, writing, group work, and discussion. While the course requires students to read and annotate outside of class, the work is often revisited and discussed in class. Additionally, students write 40-minute timed impromptu essays throughout the year, which helps them think, develop, and pull ideas together at a faster pace, a crucial skill for the AP test. According to Mrs. Vogt, students generally score a “3, 4, 5; [there are] more fours and fives than threes” on the AP Literature test.

While no retakes are offered for any assessments, Mrs. Vogt is available for extra help after school and offers plenty of other classwork opportunities to earn credit.

Additionally, Mrs. Vogt prefers to leave her students in charge of their own calendar instead of assigning a set amount of homework per night. Students receive readings and assignments about a week before they are due, giving ample time to complete them. Occasionally, Mrs. Vogt works with the students to allow the class to decide on project due dates together.

While AP Literature, like all other AP classes, requires time and effort, Mrs. Vogt advises students to be open minded when it comes to taking APs. She notes, “There’s a perception that if you’re a science person, then you’re not a literature person, and I don’t follow that way of thinking. I look at it as, [being] a thinker in science transfers to, in a class, being a problem solver and a thinker in literature. You are setting forth an idea, whether it’s a thesis statement, an argument, or an hypothesis, and then you have to figure out how valid it is... In science you work with variables, and in English you work with texts.”

AP Language & Composition

AP Language & Composition is taught by Ms. McGinley. The summer assignment is mandatory for the class. While it changes every year, it usually consists of reading and analyzing a text in preparation to write an essay.

Once the school year kicks in, Ms. McGinley prefers to assign long term assignments over daily homework, informing students about the due date “two or three weeks [prior], so students can budget their own time.” As Ms. McGinley gives students ample time to prepare, this means that time management skills, rather than completing it the day before, is a must. Students also receive the due dates of all major assignments in September.

As for the students’ ambitions, Ms. McGinley states that students “have to be very organized, strong in your time management… We are focusing on building reading, writing, and speaking skills. We do a lot of rhetorical analysis and synthesis, and we take all those skills and sort of spiral them through all sorts of assessments.”

Throughout the year, the class looks at many different texts to analyze, such as podcasts, speeches, newspapers, and poetry. For Valentine’s Day, Ms. McGinley tasked her students to analyze historical love poems on a one pager. Additionally, as for what each class period consists of – it’s never the same. Ms. McGinley likes to think outside the box, sometimes having guest speakers come into the class to help enforce real world rhetoric. Moreover, she says, “Some days we have discussions, some days we do timed writes, we do a lot of groupwork, a lot of working through challenging questions and prompts… Every day is different.”

As for the exams in class, they generally consist of “40 minutes of writing.” Ms. McGinley says she tries “to simulate the [AP exam] in class.” She believes that the effort the student puts in is an indicator of their success. “If you work hard, then I think you’ll excel.”

Ms. McGinley is available for extra help by appointment. No extra credit or retakes are offered in this course.

Lastly, AP Language is a class that constantly evolves with its students and realworld events. Students bring their own personal viewpoints and discuss recent events, learning to work as a team. “As we read nonfiction, we could talk about current events that I couldn’t plan for… Students can bring in their own interest and we can evolve the class that way… We are very much a team as we work throughout the year” says Ms. McGuinley.

AP Statistics

Overview:

AP Statistics is a foundational college-level statistics course taught by Mrs. Clark that introduces fundamental statistical concepts. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being least difficult and 5 being most difficult, Mrs. Clark ranks her class a 4/5 in difficulty. Other current students have ranked this class a 3/5 in difficulty.

For students considering this class, it is important to