This year LT has made changes to many AP courses to comply with the new additions and revisions that the College Board has made to the AP tests. Teachers have been working together over the summer in order to prepare themselves for the changes and ensure success for their students.

Both the College Board and LT teachers have noticed that it is more beneficial for students to learn how to apply their knowledge than memorize facts, Scott Eggerding, nine-year director of curriculum and instruction, said.

“The memorizing names, dates and facts are not quite as essential as being able to use that information to form a coherent argument or to put something into context of the time period,” AP U.S. history teacher Andy Newcomb, said. “I think it’s much more of a hands-on course than it has been in the past.”

Newcomb, along with the other two APUSH teachers, have been working all summer to prepare themselves for the changes. Starting this year, the APUSH test will be further aligned with Common Core standards and will focus on skills such as historical thinking rather than information, he said.

“The biggest benefit [for students] is the skills that they take away from the course, [which] are going to be much more valuable than the facts that they learn, because information is readily available to students in this age,” Newcomb said.

Next year, AP European History will begin evolving the way APUSH has this year.

In years to come, the AP European History course will have five themes and 19 key concepts, Eggerding said. The changes will make AP Euro very similar to APUSH.

Another change to the LT AP curriculum this year is the addition of AP Physics 1 in place of Physics Accel.

Physics teacher Kevin Murphy proposed the change in physics courses to the department.

“I have the weight of the program on my shoulders right now,” Murphy said. “I feel it.”

Many aspects of AP Physics 1 are very similar to those of Physics Accel. In order to comply with the College Board’s test for AP Physics 1, the physics teachers switched around some units and made others that were previously extra credit units normal units, according to Murphy.

“Students have really had to work hard as long as I have been here to get a good grade in accelerated physics,” Murphy said. “So if they do in essence the same work, now they can get an AP course on their transcript and potentially college credit.”

Not only did APUSH and AP Physics 1 change this year, but AP Art History and AP Computer Science have undergone application based changes as well, Eggerding said.

“One of the problems with [the old] tests is that they didn’t often measure how a student could think” Eggerding said. “They were most often a mind dump. Now it is taking information and doing something with it.”