Hello everyone! As high schoolers, we surely are going to be exposed a lot of difficult subjects. That’s why today, I have invited a special guest, Dang Khuat, to come here to talk about his experience studying and preparing for the AP Human Geography exam! Hope that you can gain some insight from this!
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Oh boy, AP exams. The source of holy terror to all 10th graders once upon a time.
Looking back on the whole experience, I’m still amazed at how I managed to survive. It was truly one of the most, if not THE most stressful exam experience in my life so far. But I’m sure it’s only scratching the surface. Now, if I was a snot I’d be saying stuff like “oh hard work and integrity got me through it I simply studied 25 hours a day and ate vocabulary words for breakfast lah lah lah” But no. With all honesty, I must say a large part of my success was luck. I myself wasn’t always the most vigorous scholar. My grades weren’t bad, but they also weren’t exactly above average. I don’t really shine in class discussions or when the teacher calls for a hand. Sometimes I forget to do my homework and get into massive trouble afterwards. But, personally speaking, I gained a trove of valuable experience from this whole AP exam thing.
Unlike most other DGSers, I only took one AP exam, and that was Human Geography, which is mandatory (sort of). Now, compared to what I learned in the classes of other APs, I thought that APHuG was probably the easiest one. So I was somewhat surprised when I saw that HuG had the lowest percentage of 5s among all three. Probably because I only had the one AP to focus on, instead of two (and in Bach’s case, three). So that really helped me clear my mind and focus on a specific goal. Of course, with the right mindset, it's possible to accomplish any number of goals effectively and successfully. You don’t have to have just one goal to succeed in life.
Enough about motivational yapping. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the experience.
What was my first thought upon discovering that I’d be learning “AP Human Geography'' in my 10th grade year? It’s the equivalent of Social Studies. Yes, I dumbed it down exactly like that. So that’s why I might have tackled the subject a bit less rigorously than I should have. It might have been the college equivalent of Social Studies, but my tiny little 10th grade brain failed to recognize it as such. So there I sat in my first APHuG class, taking information into my little peanut head about population pyramids and the demographic transition model. I went along with the class pretty well, not that I was at the top but I wasn’t falling behind. All the time, I thought this was something perfectly normal for a 10th grader to learn. It might be the standard nowadays, but at the time I found it a tad bit more difficult than what I experienced in the past. But still, I followed the course without much difficulty.
Around the middle of the year, maybe late December, our teacher, Ms. Carolina Safar (I owe her big time), began to emphasize the importance of the end-of-year AP exam. In my head, I interpreted it as simply a final exam, not as an AP exam. Those are different, and drastically so. Looking back on my poor little innocent self, I truly have to marvel at how easygoing I was compared to how I should have been—freaking out. But to my defense, I didn’t have any prior knowledge about AP at the time. All I thought was, “final exam, okay, time to study like crazy.” My definition of “crazy” was actually much milder than what it should have been.
I gotta say, the true panic of the situation didn’t set in until we were uncomfortably close to the exam, about one month away. But it would be a lie to say my attitude towards studying AP Human Geography didn’t change one bit. I started doing what I would never normally do for any old exam. I watched countless videos, I did all the quizzes (and by all I mean only the ones which due dates are drawing close, but I got through all of them in the end) on AP Classroom, and I even joined an APHuG Discord server (the server helped a lot, by the way). I would stay up til’ midnight almost every night, and it wasn’t for gaming this time around. Almost every moment I was free, whether at home or in class or anywhere else, as long as I had access to a device, I would be reviewing APHuG. It was.. the state of the scholar which I long dreamed to attain. The rigorous student I wanted to be but could never reach. One that actually cared about his own education. It was a bit sad to see that I can only arrive at such an awakening only at the prospect of an emergency of the sorts of an AP exam. You don’t have those every day, you know.
Time flowed like a river. Soon, the exam was one week away. That’s when it started to flow like a waterfall. At that point, I had already studied everything I needed to know. But I had no way to know if my definition of what I needed to know matched that of the test writers’. So I studied it again. And again. I studied until it felt like all my memories, neuronic connections and atomic fluctlights had all been replaced with geography. I remember making an entire website (sort of) which only purpose was to cycle through every single AP Human Geography vocabulary term known to man and hammer it into my head. The website helped a lot, although I learned more in the process of making it than in actually using it myself. I realized this is exactly the kind of self-help any student should be doing in a time of crisis like this.
At long last, the fateful day arrived. I woke up in the morning, and for a moment I thought it was another regular day. But the calendar reminded me it was May 7th, and I remembered to be nauseous. The nasty feeling remained in my gut, all the way through the bus ride and the way to school. Only when I stepped into the exam room for the first time did it subside. I guess I subconsciously knew that there is nothing else that can be done at that point, so I just automatically stopped being nervous.
I don’t remember everything that happened in that exam room. I’m sure if I tried to recall now it would just be all the mishaps and screw-ups that I did. And those are no pleasant memories to have of any exam. So my brain discarded most of it. But I do remember the exam proctors pacing around the room all hawk-eyed and me feeling like I’m in one of those crappy mobile games where you have to avoid the teacher’s gaze to cheat. It was, surprisingly, a very typical exam experience. But the sheer weight of it all, i.e the results of this exam, blurred my thoughts. So I just plowed through the whole thing.
Unfortunately, I was robbed of the fleeting, liberating feeling one would get after exiting an exam room. Another exam coming up after that one is usually to blame. But.. I was free. The APHuG exam was the very last academic burden on my shoulders of that school year (sort of). I should’ve felt relieved that it was finally over. That’s always the best part of any exam: the end of it. But I didn’t feel anything. There is another reason for the absence of such a feeling: waiting for the results. I had this obsession with getting a 5. It would’ve felt like all my efforts went to waste if I didn’t. The wait of two months for the results strained me tremendously.
And the actual results?
I got a 5.
Let’s wrap this up, shall we?
In the end, what can we take away from this endeavor? What lesson can we draw from this whole mess? Is there any experience to be garnered at all? Personally speaking, I don’t think my experience could teach anyone anything new about exam prepping or management. But if there’s one thing I want to say.. It’s that: you can only really do well on an exam once you fully grasp the importance of it.
Sounds lame, right?
I think so too.
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