Summer days are starting to turn into busy days, filled backpacks, and tighter schedules. It’s that time of year when the school year is back in session and AP courses begin again! For high school students, this is a crucial time to build a system around strategy and studying techniques for a solid year of success. Let’s break down some key pointers that will guide you to become successful.
Adding/Dropping Classes
Before you go on your back-to-school shopping spree and cram your backpack with new supplies, you should ask yourself: Am I taking the right classes for my goals and abilities? Students tend to take more AP classes to boost their GPA or impress other people, including their parents and friends. Sometimes, taking more classes can incur the opposite effect – burnout, strained relationships, and a consistent feeling of being overwhelmed.
Here’s a four-step process that lays out adding and dropping classes:
The Past Step – Registering for classes the year before
The Current Step – Setting a boundary for how many hours of studying you can do per week, per day; how many assessments (tests, quizzes, finals) you can take in a semester
The Second Week of School Step (Part A) – Writing down 3 reasons why you want to stay in each class, write down estimates for what you set a boundary for in the previous step
The Second Week of School Step (Part B) – Make a final decision on which class(es) you want to add/drop depending on your schedule and how much you can handle
Preparing for the School Year
The first week or two of the school year sets the tone. Students often start feeling overwhelmed and rushed after the first week of school, already losing sleep and feeling like they have started running a marathon without any sort of warm up.
As a recommendation, once you get your textbooks and syllabus assigned to you, a good practice is to reading ahead. This does not require a significant amount of time – it should just be a quick skim of course material and a review of the material you needed to have covered before entering this class (prerequisite). Many subjects build on each other, and textbooks oftentimes have review units or past content in their first three chapters. For example, in a Precalculus textbook, you would be reviewing Algebra 2 principles and concepts like trigonometry, types of functions, and sequences/series. In Chemistry, you could be practicing how to balance equations or performing simple conversions.
Ensuring a level of mastery with these important prerequisites can help you warm up for what’s to come next. Going through practice problems from the textbook can also give you an idea right away of what types of problems will be on the course assignments and homework.
In addition to this, you can preface yourself by taking a few multiple choice and free-response question quizzes (ungraded) on the Magna dashboard. Testing yourself on the earliest lesson in unit one would be beneficial to getting yourself into a study habit with taking practice quizzes for better knowledge retention and can help you get used to the AP exam format that will come up in May. At Magna, we have an online interface that you can utilize, especially because AP exams are now starting to shift to a digital-based format.
Mastering Organization
It’s strongly recommended to test and see which organizing tools are effective for you. Finding what works for you by the end of the first month of school will be instrumental to having a year of academic success. Organization usually connects with back-to-school purchasing, including:
- Buying and using a Planner – Planners contain full-month calendars, individual day breakdowns, and even a margin on some pages to write down a few extra notes. Writing your assignments and to-dos down can help you remember it better and help you maintain modularity for all of your deadlines, so consider purchasing one.
- Buying and keeping binders for each subject of study – Organizing your course assignments and papers can become a hassle when dumped into one area. Oftentimes, school teachers will encourage and maybe even enforce it, but it’s generally good practice to buy a folder for each subject. If you want to go even more thorough on your organizational skills, buying a binder to designate certain papers into select sections like “Homework” or “Past Exams” will help you keep all papers organized.
Maintaining a high degree of organization your assignments and tasks also depends on accountability. At school, even though this sounds conventional and pretty obvious, you should try to form study groups and have a weekly meet up at a local library or coffee shop where you discuss key topics covered in the past week for your certain AP class. Reviewing and active recall of key ideas will aid in competency and more importantly proficiency within your subject.
Seeking Help
This is a topic that is often overlooked too often by students, who end up feeling clueless and alone in their struggles. We recommend that anyone and everyone build a relationship with their school counselors, no matter how simple it may be. In high school this is important, as counselors end up sending a recommendation and school transcripts along with other school records to colleges. Leveraging teacher support can also be key to doing well in a class.
For extra academic help and for more practice, you can start here at Magna, where we revolutionize AI to curate specific quizzes (both MCQ and FRQ-based) on any type of subject. Head over to magnaeducation.ai to start preparing for your AP classes and feel free to check out one of our latest blog posts on FRQs here!
For more information on what free resources you could obtain and use to prepare for AP College Board exams, check out: https://blog.collegeboard.org/free-resources-prepare-ap-exams