Course Selection

This year is my third year of high school, and it has also been the most academically stressful year so far. During the first two years, our school mainly focused on foundational courses, so I only took two AP exams: Precalculus and Calculus BC. This year, as the final year before college applications, I naturally wanted to take as many AP subjects as possible. At first, I planned to sign up for five: World History, Statistics, Computer Science Principles, Computer Science A, and Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism. Later, my teacher suggested that I should definitely take an English course as well, so I added AP Language. At the time, my teacher put it this way: I did not necessarily have to take the exam, but if I studied the course seriously and earned a good GPA, it would not only help with college applications but also significantly improve my English ability.

The School Year Begins

After school started in September 2025, I gradually began to feel the pressure from my classes. The first challenge was Physics C. Since the course involves calculus, and I felt that I had already forgotten much of what I learned in Calculus BC last year, I spent a lot of time reviewing and reinforcing those concepts. In addition, electricity itself is quite abstract, so I also spent a lot of time trying to understand the underlying ideas. By comparison, Statistics felt quite easy at that stage. For a while, I even thought it was like an elementary-school-level class. (Of course, the later units did become more difficult.)

History felt manageable at the beginning, but once exams started, the large amount of reading material before the multiple-choice questions, combined with the severe time pressure, made it genuinely overwhelming. My history teacher also thought there were some problems with my FRQ writing and even arranged a one-on-one tutoring session for me every week. Although my history grade improved later, there was still a significant gap between my level and the expectations of the AP exam. Still, I have to admit that studying history during that period helped my English improve a lot.

As for the two computer science courses, they were generally quite manageable. I already knew most of the content in CSP, and the logic in the pseudocode section was relatively simple. For CSA, because Java's syntax and overall logic are very similar to the C++ I had learned before, the course also felt fairly smooth for me.

Mock Exam Season

By April 2026, mock exams officially began. Every subject had a mock exam every week, and I have to say that period was truly exhausting. In my first Statistics mock exam, I did not reach a 5 because I was not yet familiar enough with the concepts and question types. But after I later studied the material more systematically, I basically earned 5s on the following mock exams. As expected, both computer science courses were 5s on every mock exam. For history, because my ability was still not strong enough, my scores were never very ideal.

The subject that made me the most nervous was Physics. In fact, across all of my Physics mock exams, I never once received a 5. However, every time I analyzed my test paper, I found that aside from a few gaps in knowledge, most of the points I lost actually came from small careless mistakes. After each correction session, I felt extremely regretful and kept reminding myself not to make the same mistakes next time. Yet when the next exam came, similar mistakes would still appear.

The Real Exams

Soon, the mock exams ended, and May arrived. Although I had already gone through many mock exams, when the real AP exams approached, I still felt extremely nervous. For several days, I even had trouble sleeping because of anxiety. The first week of exams felt especially intense to me, as if every subject was harder than I had expected. Statistics was the same. The exam included quite a few question types that I had not really seen before. There were about three multiple-choice questions I was unsure about. Although I finished all the FRQs in the end, there was very little time left afterward, so I barely had any chance to check my answers carefully.

After Statistics came the subject I had always feared the most: Physics. Since I had never gotten a 5 on any of my Physics mock exams, during the period after the Statistics exam, I spent almost all my time reviewing in my physics teacher's office. At the time, I was also thinking that since the exams in the first week were all so difficult, Physics would most likely not be easy either. But when I actually took the exam, the questions turned out to be unexpectedly simple.

Next was CSA. I was actually a little nervous about this subject as well, because I had once almost written an entire FRQ incorrectly due to not reading the prompt carefully, and I would occasionally misunderstand some algorithm questions in the multiple-choice section. CSA was the day after Physics. Although I was already very tired by then, I still used the time I had to review a bit. In the end, after finishing the exam, I felt pretty good overall.

After CSA, I stayed at home for a day and then flew to Hong Kong to take the History exam. History has never been one of my strongest subjects, and because reviewing for the other AP exams had taken up a lot of my time earlier, my preparation for History had always been somewhat casual.

The final exam was CSP. Overall, this course was still relatively easy, so I only did a simple review before going into the exam. After finishing it, I also felt pretty good.