A beautiful, quiet Saturday.1
This past week, my Statistics students took a practice AP Multiple Choice Exam.2
40 questions, 90 minutes.3 30-plus pages4 times 110 students.5 Just as much of a test of mental endurance as subject matter. And since I don’t really advise students to “study”6 for it, is brutal raised to the power of brutal.7
Just like every year, I overheard a kid or two asking their friends8 if it was too late to get a refund on the AP Exam. But I prefer they feel this shock to their systems now, as opposed to when they’re walking out of the actual exam. And with a full month of nothing but review between us and May 9, most of them will be just fine.9
But a full month (and change) is all that’s left.
It’s truly insane how fast the time flies by.
- after a long, torrid, gut-wrenching week [↩]
- which is an actual past AP multiple choice exam [↩]
- The actual exam consists of two 90-minute sections: Multiple Choice and Free Response. We’ll be taking the practice Free Response in a couple of weeks. Generally if a student can earn at least 40 or 50 percent of the points on the exam, that’s good enough for a “3”. [↩]
- It is astounding how much paper we burn through this last month leading up to the exam. It is also astounding to see how much the department gets billed whenever I order these stacks of dead trees. I realize it is 2014 and we have electronic alternatives, but seeing as how the actual test is on paper, I believe in practicing on paper. [↩]
- Around 90 of them are signed up to take the actual exam next month. [↩]
- which to most kids, really means “cram” [↩]
- The first time I took one of these during my first year of teaching Stat, I scored a 33/40. The average for my students on this practice is usually around a 21 or 22, but they usually do much better on the real thing [↩]
- in jest, I hope [↩]
- Well, so says my experience in having been through this circus three times already [↩]