![Reaching out. Christopher Lesh, student at Central Catholic High School, serves ice cream during the event on March 2, 2025, at the Portland waterfront. Central Catholic was just one of the schools that sent student volunteers out to cook, prepare, dish, and serve food. Interact club’s co-president Rachel Gerber, junior, plated the food during the event. “I like how direct the contact is,” Gerber said. “You’re there [and] you’re just doing something good. It’s simple, it’s easy, you can feel good about it.”](https://wlhsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/interact-1-edited-1200x744.jpg)
*WEB CONTINUATION: This article originally appeared in Volume 105 Issue 4 of our news magazine, Amplifier.
The two weeks that make up Advanced Placement (AP) exam week can create a stressful environment for students.
AP classes can come with a harder or larger workload for students to deal with, all eventually culminating in a two week period that has students missing class in order to take these for a shot at college credit, while also studying a year’s worth of material for each AP test that the student takes.
Dr. Ryan Jordan has been the school’s AP Psychology teacher for the last three years and has seen the effects of AP testing on unprepared students.
“The worst is when kids get overly stressed out about things [and] they don’t put it in perspective,” Jordan said. “They stop finding joy in the things that normally bring them joy. It’s a really difficult period of a couple weeks where they get stressed out and they don’t need to.”
Some students will decide to do a heavy amount of last minute cramming, but Jordan believes this isn’t a good strategy.
“Cramming is not going to work,” Jordan said. “You should consider the AP test to be the finish line of a very long marathon. It’s not a sprint. You can’t learn years worth of material in a week. I talked to some students who are planning on sleeping just a few hours a night and really cramming all that stuff in. And honestly, that’s the most counterproductive thing they can do.”
Jordan suggests doing your studying throughout the entire year, instead of purely at the last minute.
“If you do five minutes a night, you’re fine. Or even throughout the year, if at dinner time with your family, if you just casually chat about what you learned that day, that’s all you need,” Jordan said. “Then by the time you get the AP test, you’ve talked about [and] recycled the information. You don’t really need to do any studying.”
Jordan believes that this method of studying will help to reduce a student’s stress to a healthy moderate amount. In AP Psychology, students cover how stress affects productivity and mood.
“Stress is not a bad thing. [But] there is an overwhelming amount of stress, and that’s bad,” Jordan said. “There’s something called the Yerkes-Dodson curve. [It] says we basically perform our best when we are feeling a moderate amount of stress.”
Jordan uses the scenario of playing poker with friends to model how moderate stress, or acute stress, can actually help productivity. If a person were to bet nothing, they’re not really going to care about how well they perform, but if they start betting hundreds of dollars, the stress can cripple them to the point where they can’t perform well. When the bet is at a moderate level, they’re able to have the stress, while also being able to lock in on the game.
“If you find out you kind of bit off more than you can chew, this is a great time to learn that lesson because AP exam scores don’t matter [to your overall grade],” Jordan said.
The stress of these tests can become overwhelming to students, but they can still be a way to set the tone and practice for future college exams..
“I think it’s good for people to know how much they can handle now in a safer environment than when they get to college and all of their decisions and failures have a price tag of thousands [of dollars],” Jordan said. “You know it’s okay. You take the AP exams here and you bomb. No one’s gonna care. No one.”
