Advanced Placement (AP) Exam Registration Season is upon us and, for students, this is an important time since it means tackling which exams to take and figuring out the fees. Students may have to hurry, especially since the due date is October 22.
Taking one AP exam costs around $124, and while the price may seem unusually high to some, it’s actually set by College Board, the organization in charge of AP. Upon closer look, students will find that one exam costs $99 with a school fee of $25. Assistant Principal Jes O’kelley, who is the new AP Exam coordinator, explains that Lambert High School is simply an intermediary for College Board.
“We don’t pay to administer it,” Ms. O’kelley explained. “They charge a fee and we’re the middleman, bringing the money from the student to the College Board.”
With the cost being over a hundred dollars, some students are unsure of whether or not they should take the exam. However, Ms. O’kelley wants to encourage students to try regardless of how well they are doing in their AP classes. She believes that everyone deserves a chance to take the exam, and even if a student does not do too well on it, their grade will not be affected.
This year, a challenge Lambert faced was making sure that every students’ needs were met through programs such as free and reduced lunch. Besides that, they had to work on making sure the state gave the required funding that is allocated for AP classes in time. As a result, students noticed that the registration window opened later in comparison to the previous year. Ms. O’kelley notes that this is due to delays in funding approval from the state, such as the Science Technology Engineering Math (S.T.E.M) waiver that allows students in those classes to take the exam for free, though they still have to pay the school fee.
“The window for registration was a little later this year because there’s some things with the state approving funding for students who qualify for free and reduced lunch,” Ms. O’kelley said. “And making sure we’re still getting that S.T.E.M. waiver that we provide. I wanted to make sure that everything, once it was open, was ready for everybody. I didn’t want our students to feel like they didn’t have the opportunity to register.”
However, despite the timing issue, the process to organize the registration window was simple for Ms. O’kelley and the staff, who give credit to Ms. Schuyler, Lambert’s AP Exam Coordinator last year. With that in mind, Ms. O’kelley wants to keep providing the same customer services that Ms. Schuyler was giving.
“Miss Schuyler was our previous assistant principal and she did it at Central [High School] before she came here,” Ms. O’kelley explained. “So coming in and wanting to make sure that I’m continuing to provide that same level of customer service to our students that she did has been big for me.”
AP Exams can be daunting, but, in the end, they usually prove to be beneficial for students. The deadline to register is October 22 and students can find instructions to register on the Lambert Website.
