AP Exams Begin
Although Exeter does not offer courses with the AP curriculum, many students are taking the exams this May due to factors such as college admissions and course placement.
"Colleges do not expect our students to take AP exams. However, we do encourage students to take AP exams if they plan to apply to foreign universities," the CCO website reads. Still, in May 2012, four years after Exeter declined participation in the College Board’s Advanced Placement audit citing a curriculum advanced beyond AP exam material, 196 students took 369 AP exams in 29 subject areas. Of the 369 exams, 63% were 5’s, 22% were 4’s, 10% were 3’s and 4% were 2’s.
Students differed in their views of whether there was pressure from peers to take AP exams at Exeter, and the impact of the exams on college admissions.
"There definitely is [pressure], but it isn't excessive or undue," senior Connor Soltas said. He attributed this to Exeter’s culture of high comparison. "Same reason why there's pressure to overload yourself with tough classes or extracurriculars or lots of friends. It's partly social--if I'm the only one not taking the BC calc AP in my class, I'm going to feel like the odd man out--and partly the shared internal motivation we Exonians seem to share," he said.
However, other students felt limited pressure to take AP exams. "I think there's actually more pressure not to take them," upper Shannon Diesch said. "It seems like back home they were much more important, or you were supposed to take them. But here it's really a choice that doesn't seem to matter as much."
Large variations exist in students’ AP exam participation. Lower Jonathan Ye said that he decided to take the AP Chinese and Computer Science Exams in hopes of boosting his college resume. "I took them because I was already in the class level and I thought that it might help with college decisions," he said.
Senior Yasmin Bashirova elected not to take any AP exams this year or her upper year because she viewed a student’s academic record as more important in decisions. "In my view, there isn’t much need to take them, because if you get good grades in a specific subject at Exeter, an exam is superfluous," she said.
In addition to helping their college resume, students often take APs when applying to international universities. "I took AP exams because I wanted to apply to schools in England that put more emphasis on them," senior Vivian Chen, who took seven AP exams last year, said.
Students also differ on how well Exeter’s advanced coursework is in preparing them for AP exams.
"Exeter does a pretty good job preparing us for science and math APs and the essay components of history/English APs. It wasn’t very difficult since AP exams are far less challenging than the tests and essays given by my Exeter teachers," Chen, who self-studied two APs, said.
"I think it's hard to prepare since Exeter is not a very AP-oriented school, but the knowledge we get from the courses do help," upper Linh Tran, who took the AP Chemistry exam last year and will take AP Spanish this year, said. "It’s just that we ourselves need to familiarize with the process much earlier. The teachers teaching the more AP-oriented courses do have pretty good strategies and stuff, but preparing takes a lot of self determination from students," she said.
Still, many students are glad that Exeter courses do not teach specifically to the exam.
"AP tests are monopolized and overpriced, and although [CollegeBoard] tried to make it less about memorization, to some extent, that’s still what they test," senior Tez Clark said. "We don’t want to be dependant on Collegeboard rather than our own ideas on what learning should be."