AP classes, also known as advanced placement classes, are classes that tend to be a bit more challenging than regular classes. This is a course offered in high school for students who are interested in earning more credit to better their GPA. It gives high school students a little taste of how college life would be, well supposedly at least Last semester I took English 100 through Cerritos College, which was a dual enrollment course. Dual Enrollment courses are a program that allows high school students to take actual college classes and earn college credits at the end, which is what I did.
As a student currently enrolled in an AP course, I can confirm that advanced placement courses are a bit challenging. Some might even say it’s more challenging than actual college courses. The AP class I am currently taking moves at a fast pace, yet still tries to prepare us for the exam at the end of the year. For most of the class, we are often independent when it comes to our assignments. We must read and learn about court cases on our own while also answering questions on how we interpreted the cases. There are times where we do read as a class and have class discussions, but for the most part it’s a lot of independent work. We are required to memorize and understand political processes, which is a wide subject that doesn’t just focus on one specific thing.
As for college courses on the other hand, we also were expected to work by ourselves, but were still offered help multiple times when needed. My professor would always tell us that in her class we were college students, so that’s how she was going to treat us, like college students. She made us feel like college students by giving us freedom, freedom that you wouldn’t receive as a high school student. Yes, she was our professor, but by the way she treated us it didn’t really feel like a strict teacher to student relationship. She saw us face to face and believed that respect was earned, not given. Throughout the whole semester we only had to write four essays and although that may seem easy, the essays progressively got harder as we went. However, the assignments we were assigned prepared us the essays so it didn’t really feel that difficult. We were also given many chances to redo them and provided a lot of resources to help us with our essays. Our last assignment in the course was a ten page report. Which freaked us out in the beginning, but when we got to it, it really wasn’t that hard. Personally, I think one of the main reasons why this course wasn’t that hard was because of the way my professor set it up. At first yeah, I was afraid to take this class because one, it was a college course, and two many AP teachers were telling me that it was a pretty hard course. However, after finishing the course and also being an AP student I do believe that AP classes are way harder than actual college courses.