(April 5, 2012) -- “I’m sorta-kinda nervous...that’s why I went,” said senior Daniel Dietz, referring to the afterschool practice sessions given by Armineh Mikaelian for AP Calculus students. “I need to ace the test.” Dietz said.

The AP tests are a creation of the College Board, created to test students’ competency with college-level material. If a student does well on an AP test, he or she can potentially skip that course in college or university. For this reason, most AP tests require a lot of hard work.

Students who were interested in more practice stayed after school to take practice questions. “The first year I did an after-school session, I had great feedback. The students said that the AP test was much easier because of the practice,” said Armineh Mikaelian.”Ever since then, I’ve wanted to give other students the same opportunity.” She had the students take the written portion of a practice AP exam and then check their answers and ask questions. The students then received a packet to take home for extra practice. “I’m really going to work hard on them,” Dietz said. “I have to.”

Many of the students felt like the practice session was extremely necessary to do well. “It makes us familiar with the actual AP test,” said junior Anush Kadoyan. “It’s helpful to see what we’re going to have to face.”

“There was this one question where we had to figure out the limit as T approaches infinity. The questions really make you think.” said junior David Khatchatrian. “Some of them specifically try and trick you. Others, you don’t even go over in class half the time, so it’s good that we have these sessions to help us.”