AP Psychology.....

Yeah, remember when I just said I was done with all of my AP exams? Well, I wasn't exactly. I still had my good old AP Psych exam just last Thursday. That, along with an internship I just got for this summer, is essentially what I've been doing since my junior year ended. (Yeah, my school's over! So anticlimactic. No goodbyes, yearbooks, or anything. We just kind of finished.)

Anyway, the reason I didn't mention Psych as one of my exams is because it's not actually a class that I'm taking. Me and my friend, Arijit, decided back in the winter that we wanted to self-study AP Psych and take the exam, just for funsies and because psych is seriously interesting.

Obviously, this was Arijit's crazy idea. He's the type to come up with the strangest plans on a whim and then just try and execute them. The goal was to, over the semester, learn the units from the Barron's book that reviewed for the exam, then just take the test and see how well we could do.

...

Yeah, that didn't happen. Both of us were busy enough that by the time AP exams rolled around, we'd both done maybe one or two units, combined. This put us in quite a bind to be able to prepare for the Psych exam, originally on May 20, along with all of our other APs. But, we tried.

As soon as my AP Chem exam finished on May 7, I had essentially two weeks to prepare. I tried to do one unit a day, leaving a couple days at the end to review. I wasn't taking notes or reviewing vocab, just reading the chapter basically (Hint: the vocab is actually really important for Psych, as I would learn) so that meant I could move at a reasonable pace and stay on track. Arijit went a bit in the opposite direction, taking notes and making flashcards for the chapters. He definitely wasn't on track, but he really got the chapters he read down.

Bit of a deus ex machina, but we were able to get the exam moved to the backup Administration 3 date of Thursday, June 3, after all of our other APs.

The weekend before, however, I was more focused on my summer internship. What I am essentially doing in that internship is data collection, at the moment. I'm working with a PhD student (control engineer) to help him write a chapter for a peer-reviewed book on machine learning and vehicle safety features. One of the parts in our chapter is what cars have what driver assist systems, exactly. So that's what I'm doing. It's a lot of work, even now, and I'm kind of behind. So much for summer.

Back to Psych. Arijit and I really got cracking the Tuesday and Wednesday before the exam. He somehow blazed through the entire second half of the book during those days, keeping up his vocab prep. I had already finished all the chapters, and discovered that I needed a fair bit of vocab help even though I had most of the concepts down. So I reviewed that.

And we both did a couple of AP prep tests together. The Psych exam has about 100 multiple choice in 70 minutes, (way more than any other exam). Either you know them, or you don't. Knowledge of vocabulary really helps here. Some of them were statistics questions (psych has a lot of statistics, apparently), and since I've taken AP Statistics those were easy claps.

The exam also has two FRQs. The first one gives you a situation and about seven psych terms that you have to define and relate to a topic. The picture at the top is an example. Obviously, again, very vocab-based. The second FRQ also has maybe three or four terms like the first but also has maybe three or four experimental questions. Stuff like, what is the operational definition of the dependent variable or what does this experimental design block for, etc.

Anyway, we both walked in (Well, not walked in. Sat down, since we were taking it at home.) at 1 P.M. to the psych exam, having studied together a lot of last night and a couple of hours before the test.

And we did ok! Gauging our performance from our practice tests, we got probably 80/100 on the MCQs and 5-6/7 on the FRQs. Checking Albert.io for our predicted AP score, we could easily have gotten either a high four or low five. (AP tests are graded 1-5). Which is really not bad for self-studying an entire class.

I'm proud of us, honestly. Psych was interesting, studying together was fun, even the AP test itself was pretty good. And if we got FIVES, that would be freaking amazing. We'll have to wait till July to see.