The AP Marathon

By Savanna Choi

The ten-day marathon of AP exams finally drew to a close. The now-lowered finish line, which seemed once miles away and another time chokingly close, is now smothered in jumping footprints, empty RedBull bottles, dried-up contact lenses, and ashes of burnt practice exams. 

This marathon strikes a different experience for seniors than the adorably nervous sophomores or the pitifully anxious juniors. Seeing another finish line of graduation right behind the finish line of APs, the urge to limbo the first one and skip to the next consumes our being in the name of senioritis. With this inverse supply of AP difficulty and motivation, seniors literally had to drag their soulless bodies and fingers to the AP Classroom if they hadn’t given up already. As we got closer to May, more and more seniors began to disappear from campus in the false hope of studying at home like we once did as juniors. The local coffee bean has never seen such a crowd with a collective dark circle length longer than their tallest cups yet somehow ignorantly joyful. 

“Studying for AP Biology gave me a greater appreciation for life, but not for my life,” said Cullno Mah (12), an infamous biology student. 

“Savanna, Joseph and I had a three-day-long AP Calculus BC grind just to play more video games than FRQ practices,” said Douglas Koay (12), a fellow AP Calculus BC warrior. 

“We were best prepared for the AP Literature exam by watching the marble races where the blue marbles cheered in the stands, allowing us to imagine those blue marbles cheering for us this time during the exam,” said Sam Owen (12), a triple-English honor student. 

“I felt pretty calm before the AP Statistics exam but the exam tired me so much that I just wanted to sleep”, said Aidan Leong (12), a violation of the normality assumption. 

We have been annual participants of this AP marathon, some as sprinters and some as long-distance runners. The reward of completion was relief for most, but also with nostalgia for the graduating class. This was our last “AP season,” bidding farewell to not only AP Daily videos, AP internet forums and communities, and beloved YouTube lecturers, but to the friends we went to the Hillside Starbucks with and the friends we found to be already there, discussions of homework questions in study halls, the exasperated FaceTime calls and desperate messages asking for guidance between each other, group chats calling for group study sessions, and the teachers we would consult together. We have been in this marathon together longer than we think—the ten days of exams merely manifest our collective experience. 

The senior class now enters the golden overlap of time between the end of APs and graduation where academic pressure finally ceases, facing the end of a longer run, the twelve-year marathon. Switching the battleground from the land of all-nighters to the land of water guns, seniors arm themselves for their final fight, walking around campus one last time as the warriors that they are, residing in each other’s company for ten more days like we’ve been doing so for years.