Opinion: Morning AP Exams Shouldn’t Have Class

Tanvi Dange'17, Co-Editor-in-Chief

I am tired.

 

I spent most of last night reviewing for my AP Calculus AB exam, and I had to get up at 7 a.m.  to take the exam. On top of that, I’m feeling sick, but I can’t miss school because I have play rehearsal from 3:15 –  7 p.m.. I just finished my exam, and all I want to do is take a nap; I just need a little power nap to get me through the day. But unfortunately for me, my AP exam was in the morning, so I still have to go to class in the afternoon. In my opinion, this is an injustice because if my exam was in the afternoon, I would be able to sleep in, which is equivalent to a power nap.

 

Looking back on the day of my exam, I began to wonder if I was any other person, would I still believe that morning AP exams should have the day off? Turns out, I’m not the only person at Peddie who prays that my exams will fall into the afternoon time slots. Many people, like me, felt like their brains were fried after sitting through a four hour-long exam and wished they had a couple hours off in the afternoon to relax. Others felt like they needed the time to catch up on the work they missed in the morning. But essentially everyone had the same underlying theme in their reasoning: they felt as though they needed a break.

 

A break is a valuable thing to have, especially at Peddie. Each day, student schedules are packed with rigorous classes, after school activities, club meetings, and plenty of homework that keeps students busy for longer than the hours of study hall. And on a day of a time consuming exam, it unfair that some students get to have a break while others do not.

 

Melanie Clements stated that the reason afternoon classes have off in the morning is so that students can study, and morning exams do not get classes off because they wouldn’t need to study for the exam since it would be over. And while that’s true, I truly believe that time could be used for other productive things such as catching up on other work or taking the time to cope with the stress that these APs bring.