Uni High Gargoyle Staff Blog

Today I took the Calculus AB AP test, and I must admit that even after spending a countless number of days in class reviewing for the exam by doing old APs for homework, I still thought that it was ridiculously hard.

I cannot say that I was fully confident walking into Room 1130 in Siebel this morning about my calculus prowess, but I can say that I thought I had a pretty fair idea of what sorts of questions would be on the test and the best way to approach them.

It turns out that I could not have been more wrong. The gruesome free response questions were tricky enough to more than make up for the fact that the multiple-choice went by without too much of a glitch.

After stumbling out of the exam a good four hours later I could not help but engage in a discussion about the AP with my classmates. The general consensus among us was that this year’s AP was much different and much harder than any of us previously anticipated, based on the nine APs (1993-2006), that teacher Elizabeth Jockusch had given us for homework over the past few weeks.

While doing those APs, none of us felt like the free response questions would be as tricky and painful as they were. Even though the answer sheet was right next to us while doing most of the practice AP problems, we still felt like on those APs where we did not have the answers we still performed admirably.

Today was entirely different, and it made me wonder if this is how people feel every year after emerging from that exam. I wondered if every year students wonder why their practice problems were so different and the actual exam so much harder than anticipated.

Looking back to when I did the 2006 Calculus AB AP for homework, I couldn’t help but feel that the problems were relatively simple and I got through them without feeling like I needed to gouge out my eyeballs. So will next year’s Calculus AB class look back on this AP and think that we were mentally incompetent because we found it as difficult as we did?

I hope not.

— Shivani Khanna