Wow, so it wasn't just my high school that had the great divide? I wouldn't call them remedial classes but there was a fine distinction between kids in AP/Honors classes and those who weren't. We used to call it the AP bubble since the people in your AP classes you saw in all your classes and people who weren't in the bubble you forgot went to your school unless you were in sports, student gov, or something like that. My high school was a pretty decent size (2500) but the AP bubble definitely made it feel smaller. It's really weird now that I'm at UCLA and the only segregation there is is between North (humanities/social sciences) & South (math/science) campuses.

Now, I know that FIRST is blessed to have many top students but I know there's many who aren't all in AP classes or scoring as high as these stellar marks we've been seeing. Just to prevent people from totally freaking out, don't worry too much! As a person who's been through the whole college application process, I got into a handful of nice schools and my AP scores (and SATs actually) weren't that spectacular. To compensate, I did work really hard to have a high GPA, had a good personal statement, and was in a lot of clubs and stuff. So that's just my bit to people who might have been intimidated by seeing all these 4's and 5's. Keep up the good work all though.

Well I didn't take any AP exams, but one of my best friends took the AP US History exam and got a 3...she's the only one besides the guy that's #2 in our class that's gotten a passing score...that I know of. The #1 ranked girl in my class only got a 1. I heard that majority didn't do good b/c the material is suppose to be taught over a 2 yr period and it was all crammed into 1 yr....but idk how true that is.

I always pick smart friends!:)

~Jessica~

AP US History is a 3-semester course at our school, and our pass rate was decent.

Oh yes...and if it helps, the pass rate for AP Biology was 95%.

yeah, i wondered about that...
the teacher got us all freaked out, and then it turned out to be absurdly easy.
except for that question about the chii square.
where the #$@! was a chii square in the bio book!

Ah yes...that one. They gave the formula as part of the problem, so all that was required was to plug in the values and solve. Not hard at all. Unfortunately, our school didn't offer any real statistics course last year, so the students who weren't very capable critical thinkers had some trouble with the unfamiliar formula.

The question that was considerably more troubling was the last one. Not because of difficulty, just because it was so...morbid.

BTW, if you use the english, it's spelled with one i. Chii is a persocom.

it resembled (for me anyways) the equation for sum of squares, but when i tried to plug the numbers in, the result didn't make much sense (i can't remember exactly what i got).
oh well, i earned my 5, and thats what counts.

Wow, US History is only taught for a year here but we've had a 100% pass rate for the past...8 or so years? Actually, people look at you kind of funny if you get a 3 as oppose to a 4 or 5. We had an awesome teacher though (he also has a 100% pass rate for AP Gov). He's the one who inspired me to be a poli sci major.

oh question. This amazing teacher, they cut back on the amount of AP classes he was allowed to teach because they wanted him to teach normal classes too. They've done this with several teachers that were the head of their departments and solely teaching AP classes. The school believes that these top teachers should be available to all, does this happen at other schools too?

Your school's lucky that it has enough talented students for it to make a difference. Our enrollment in AP classes is rather low; there are 6 in AP french, 3 in AP french lit, 17 in AP phys, and 20 in AP bio.
Or maybe we're just that elitist over here.:ahh:

Could be that you just have a small school.... in my school (9-12), I think its between 2000 and 2500 kids - more than 500 per grade. Compared to your 17 people in AP Physics, our AP Physics has 4 teachers teaching 5 classes of about 30 students each.

To put it into perspective, we have so many kids in the AP program, we have to close off one of the Cafeterias (we have 3) for two weeks during AP testing, so there's enough room for each test. As if that wasn't enough, for several tests this year (AP US is the only one I know if) we also had to close off the library for half the day.

Our school is around 1800, so I don't think we're that small. Though 3 cafeterias does sound very impressive.

We had 930 this past year, but I still saw someone new everyday...lol. They were all the underclassmen...they get on my nerves sometimes......:) 3 cafeterias is very impressive to me! hehe

~Jessica~