With the  AP Human Geography exam fast approaching, students have started to create study groups to practice for their first ever AP test taking place on May 14.

“Everybody was pretty stressed about the AP exam,” freshman Isra Juwariya said. “Since this is our first exam, we weren’t quite sure how to study by ourselves. Especially since this is our first year in high school, it takes a while to figure everything out. So, having to study a whole year’s worth of content for an exam seems like a fruitless attempt and that’s when my friends and I texted some people and asked them if they’d be interested in studying together because we felt it would help us and we were giving others a chance to benefit from it as well.”

With most students carrying around the class textbook of more than 400 pages long, learning all of the content can be challenging.

“It’s hard,” freshman Vinay Gaddam said. “We mostly try to read over the books chapter by chapter, and then reread and highlight important facts and take the quizzes in the books for each section. We get a lot of the practice from our actual class as well because we have started to take tests over the information daily.”

With a little more than three weeks until the exam, the groups are trying to squeeze as much studying in as they can.

“Everybody has busy schedules,” Juwariya said. “We have to accommodate to everyone’s schedules, which can get tough. Sometimes we study during advisory because we bring our books literally everywhere with us nowadays, and we try to study once a week or so at the library on the weekends.”

As easy as getting a group together is, making sure that they stay on task is a different story.

“We asked around and made a group pretty quickly,” Gaddam said. “The hard part of this is I think getting everybody to focus and actually want to learn. If everyone is doing something or the other or they’re on their phones and not paying attention, there doesn’t really seem to be a point to the whole thing.”

Although having study groups for the AP exam is one way to prepare, it might be not be the best way for all students.

“About half the time, study groups are beneficial,” HGAP teacher Tim Johannes said. “I think it really depends, I wouldn’t recommend study groups for some people and for some I would. It depends on the person, their work ethic, and how much they care about the exam. It’s tricky because these are freshman and they haven’t gone through this yet, it’s a new experience for them. If they’re really committed, I think in the long run, it would really be a benefit for those students.”