Staring this year, College Board opened up AP Classroom, an online resource to help students prepare for the AP test throughout the school year and standardize the concepts they will need to know. 

This new online resource gives teachers and students access to the types of questions on the AP test as well as progress checks and dashboards, features that allow teachers to monitor how well students understand the material.

Students are given a code to join their teachers’ online classroom within the first few weeks of school and can do problem sets and practice sections of the AP tests.

Some SHS AP teachers are using the site, while others are not, with some complaining about a lack of training in terms of putting it into full implementation.

AP U.S. History teacher Faith Daly said that she is using a progress check feature on the site for her students. It helps her see what she needs to review again in the class before unit tests.

Since there are different textbooks for each AP subject, the basics of the AP curriculum need to be standardized so that anyone in the country can access the outline of the concepts they need to know.

“AP Classroom is for all AP students worldwide and not all classes use the same textbook,” AP Calculus AB and AP Statistics teacher Jennifer Mantle said. “So, the authors of the course description put together the outline in a way that seemed appropriate for a wide audience.”

While the online AP Classroom can be beneficial to students’ understanding of the material, the organization of the website can also create some confusion since topics are covered in a different order than in textbooks.

Mantle is using the new AP Classroom for all her courses. She said that the topic outline on the classroom does not align with the chapters of the textbooks from either of her courses, which means the problem sets that can be assigned from AP Classroom can include topics the students have not yet covered. 

“I think that it can be confusing if a unit module is assigned in the classroom that contains material or questions that students haven't learned yet,” Mantle said. “Students can't always recognize that just by looking at a problem so they might try to do a problem that they think they have learned, but then get stuck and I'm sure that's frustrating and confusing.”

Another challenge is that the AP Classroom was made available to students and teachers this past August, and teachers have not received any training on how best to use it. Mantle said that she is not using the site to its full potential for that reason, but it has not stopped her from utilizing the problem sets and assessments offered. 

Although AP Classroom provides several resources, AP Biology teacher Cheryl Lenz prefers to use a different website, Mastering Biology, which she has been using for six to seven years.

“The program we are doing now has a lot of flexibility, so I think for now it applies well to both the classroom and school curriculum,” Lenz said. “For now, the chapters that I cover and AP Classroom covers are different, but toward AP testing time, I will probably open up the AP Classroom questions and concepts because by then all the materials would be covered.”

The Mastering Biology curriculum is especially helpful, according to Lenz, since it is in the same order as the biology textbook she uses.

“Since it’s the first year of using AP Classroom, it’s probably not as user-friendly as the publisher program to students. If the AP Classroom system is changed so that it can be flexible to different curriculums with different teachers, I probably think it will be much more beneficial to students,” Lenz said.

So far, AP Classroom is primarily used for class test preparations in APUSH, and it is proving to be a helpful resource to many students. 

Junior Fiona Lee is currently taking AP U.S. History, AP Biology, AP Calculus AB and AP Computer Science. Her AP U.S. History and Computer Science classes assign work from the AP classroom but Biology and Calculus do not. 

“I think there is a bit of a difference in understanding,” Lee said. “I wish sometimes that AP Bio also gave practice problems on AP Classroom because it does help me reinforce my knowledge of the material before tests.”

Daly said AP Classroom can be a useful tool for both teachers and students in studying material and seeing where there is room for improvement.

“It’s helpful in giving me a snapshot of what we need to go over in class before the formal unit test,” Daly said. “It also gives students an ability to see what they need to focus more on the unit. A lot of diagnostic information we get back from it is very useful because it gives the students the opportunity to practice the test-like reviews.”