Explosion of AP Exams (rant part 1)

At my high school, we've been having AP Exams stuffed down our throats. Now that they've reared their head, I'm finding I'm pretty darned stressed. Two this week, two next week. It was my own decision to take these blasted, challenging exams, though, and I don't regret it. They're preparing me for what finals week and even normal tests will be like during college. And they really force me to focus on my classes: which exams I want to do very well on, and which I don't particularly need a 5 on.

This year, for example, I'm taking the AP Japanese Language exam. I've only been studying Japanese for three years, so why would I do that? Well, it's more than likely that I'll be majoring in the language, I absolutely love it, and I'm going there this summer, so why not push myself? No one else has ever gotten a 5 on the exam in our district, so my goal is to familiarize myself with the exam this year, and then take it next year to receive as high a score as possible. I've accelerated my studies extremely, and have found it to be an adequate (if not a little overwhelming) challenge. Learning 300 kanji within a matter of two months (when I decided to take the exam) is quite hard. But I've been managing.

From this kanji study, I've learned that planning for these things is no joke. I procrastinated for a while, and now have been studying like hell to get as many of them down as I can. I'm a little afraid that I won't be as prepared as I liked...

But that's why I did that this year and not next year, when the score really matters to me. Because we can afford to allow for preparation slip-ups, and even failures, I'm willing to risk a 2 or 3 on the exam this year. Though it will drop my AP exam average and prevent me from receiving National AP Scholar, that won't matter when I enter a high-level Japanese program in college because of my exceptional score.

And hey, it's a larger lesson in planning. I hadn't anticipated the size of this task, mostly because I hadn't thought about it much after I took it on; now, I'll know to look to the future when I'm taking on a project as large as this, to plan better.