It starts the same way every May: students hunched over cramped desks, fingers flying across keyboards as the clock ticks down, eyes darting to the clock as if they can stop time itself. The room is thick with collective anxiety, all for a single number, the score that is supposed to prove students have mastered “college-level” learning. And yet, the very system designed to showcase rigor is the one that threatens to flatten it.
For decades, Advanced Placement (AP) classes have been the gold standard of academic achievement. They promise college-level learning and impressively weighted GPAs, but increasingly, they have come to represent a curriculum built around memorization, formula and test-taking rather than what education should stand for: curiosity, depth and genuine thirst for knowledge. As students rush to stack APs like academic currency, it is worth asking not just what we are learning, but what kind of learners we are becoming.
The AP system’s flaw lies not in its goal of providing rigor but in the structure that defines what rigor looks like. College Board’s curriculum trains students to think critically within narrow parameters, to analyze quickly and efficiently for a score, not to linger in uncertainty or design their own questions.
In STEM, this pressure translates into coverage over comprehension. In many AP science courses, the fast-paced curriculum can make sustained experimentation difficult. Labs are becoming more rehearsed rather than exploratory, aimed at verifying known results rather than investigating new ones.
“In AP … we try to pick labs or try to write labs that are based on old FRQs,” Science Department Chair Romina Jannotti said. “We’re trying to give you practical experience so that you understand where the question came from. And they’re just more geared towards teaching you technique, so that when you go to college … or a research experience, you know how to do some basic things.”
While teaching technique is important, the AP schedule rarely gives students time to sit with failure and moves too quickly for students to analyze their mistakes and redesign experiments, potentially turning discovery into data collection.
“There are lots of people in the AP Chem community that would only teach to a test and not do a single lab,” Jannotti said. “They would teach students how to fake it through those FRQs.”
Jannotti believes this is not a problem at Trinity but has seen it at other schools, with teachers struggling to deal with the pressure that College Board can produce.
The issue extends to AP math classes, where lessons can default to formula memorization over conceptual inquiry: learning how to use equations rather than understanding where they come from. Though free-response questions often apply formulas to everyday or scientific scenarios, so much time goes toward covering material for the exam that students rarely get to explore these applications deeply or connect them to broader ideas.
The humanities face their own version of this problem. AP English and history courses reward mastery of rubrics over mastery of thought. Writing becomes a performance, essays shaped by templates and paragraphs polished for phrasing rather than meaning.
“In all of the essays in AP English classes, there’s the sophistication point,” said English teacher Kent Kersten, who teaches both AP English Language and AP English Literature. “One way that you could get the sophistication point is if you just have an extra cogent analysis or if you have really well-articulated prose.”
The other five points reward adhering to a defined structure: a defensible thesis, relevant evidence and logical commentary. The “sophistication” point aims to reward nuance and voice, but it is still a subjective measure. The uncertainty of what will impress an unseen grader encourages students to stick to safe, formulaic writing they know will check the boxes.
In AP history, the structure is even more rigid: context, thesis, claim, evidence, reasoning, repeat. The issue is not that these skills lack value; clarity and evidence absolutely matter. But when the format rewards students who can mimic the model rather than those who write with an authentic style, voices become standardized and individuality is flattened.
College Board’s design means that creativity must always work around a system built for uniformity. Science, reduced to steps. Writing, reduced to rubrics. Thought, reduced to templates. Curiosity, reduced to compliance.
If teaching an AP class is difficult, teaching it well is an art. It requires balancing the strict structure of the exam with the freedom to explore.
At Trinity, AP Language students write manifestos and personal identity essays, reflections that bridge literature and personal philosophy. In AP Literature, Kersten incorporates creative projects like modernized “Hamlet” trailers, which don’t directly translate to the AP exam but stick with students far longer than multiple-choice questions ever could.
Stephanie Dryden, head of middle school and former director of curriculum, feels that a creative curriculum and AP goals can go hand in hand.
“Ideally, if you are designing your curriculum with those larger goals in mind, the standardized test will take care of itself,” Dryden said. “It’s a happy byproduct.”
Dryden believes in freedom within structure: Teachers at Trinity use the AP curriculum as a framework, not a finish line.
“We kind of teach with the test in the backdrop, but it doesn’t own our whole curriculum,” Kersten said.
Still, even when instructors bring creativity to the classroom, the looming presence of “the test” defines the rhythm of the year. And that rhythm — unit, review, practice test, repeat — rarely leaves room for the messy, slow, human process of genuine learning.
The cultural pressure around APs makes this worse. Students, often encouraged by parents and peers, feel they must take as many as possible to be competitive, turning Advanced Placement classes into “All People’s” classes since everyone is vying for a seat in the AP classroom.
“I feel an internal pressure to teach enough of the test and expose the students to the types of essays they’ll be writing and the multiple choice they’d be familiar with,” Kersten said. “I think we, at Trinity, we kind of take it as a given that most students will pass.”
That expectation cuts deep both ways. Students feel it too, the quiet, unspoken agreement that passing is not just the goal but the standard. For many, the reason to take an AP class is the number at the end: the five that shines on a transcript, the 0.5-point boost in their GPA.
The contradiction is exhausting. We do not want our teachers to teach to the test, yet we silently hope they do, because failure is not just personal; it is institutional.
“We hire people who are experts in their fields, and we trust them to do an outstanding job,” Dryden said.
Some schools have capped the number of APs that a student can take, hoping to cut off the quiet arms race that has turned education into a status game. Other schools across the nation, like in New England, have phased out APs entirely, replacing them with advanced in-house courses that emphasize research, collaboration and creativity, without the label.
We do not need to fully eliminate APs but rather prevent them from becoming the sole definition of what “advanced” means. Trinity’s challenge is to continue offering APs as one pathway to rigor while also protecting the space for curriculum that expands beyond the test.
“The goal I think is that we want to offer both a rigorous curriculum, but (also) the advantage of AP is that it also allows us to put our curriculum in a national context or international context even for colleges,” Dryden said.
That philosophy shapes much of Trinity’s approach, though the balance is still delicate. While the pressures of pacing and performance in AP courses inevitably remain, the school has worked hard to keep curiosity in view, from student-designed research classes to interim terms that remind students to actually learn.
The irony of AP’s promise is that its very name, Advanced Placement, implies movement forward. But as it stands, it often locks schools into a backward-facing model of learning, replication instead of innovation.
