All of us are sort of tired of hearing “AP for all” shouted throughout BHS. However, dreading AP exam days doesn’t even come close to the dread of receiving AP scores. But we never think about the people who actually score our scribbled down, most-likely panicked, writings – some of whom are our teachers (though they can’t grade our actual exams).

To become an AP grader, a teacher has to have taught the course for three years. The College Board covers the expenses for the graders to travel all over the US to score.  The experience is almost like a conference for teachers to learn more about how to teach their course so that their students will do well on the exam. BHS history teacher Lance Kuntzman called it the “best professional development I’ve ever been to.” Other AP graders like history teachers Cory Eno, Brent Jansen, Mike Petze, and Latin teacher Victoria Miklosky, all agree.

  Though all of the teachers had different experiences in grading the AP tests, they all gave a similar opinion on BHS administration’s support for their going to grade the exams; the administration encourages grading as it improves them as teachers. It gives teachers insight on how the writings are graded and then helps them improve BHS students’ writing in class.

Most BHS teachers who go (Eno, Jansen, Kuntzman, Petze) are history teachers because history exams are so popular and so more graders are needed. Miklosky is one of the very few AP Latin exam graders. “It’s intimate, with just the 40 of us compared to history gradings,” she said.  Miklosky has been grading the exams for “forever” (aka 12 years) and is writing part of the exam next year, as well as being a question leader this year.

Hearing about funny things that your friends write on AP exams isn’t anything new – I can’t be the only one who doodled all over the place and wrote “I’m sorry” a billion times. But every teacher has funny stories from reading the tests – Eno said how teachers actually pass around Post-its with funny, good, or even sad things kids write in their responses that are eventually stuck on the wall for everyone to see. Kuntzman mentioned how there seems to be a theme each year: YOLO, “this is sparta,” “why so serious” among others. Petze also mentioned he scored 10 pages of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” before… and had to read it all.

Every grader really searches to give students points. It’s almost impossible to get a zero – unless of course you decide to just scribble “YOLO” on the page rather than anything related to the subject.