How to Help Your Teen Ace AP Exams: Predictable 4s & 5s with Dr. Joe Sebestyen

Parents, is your teen college ready? Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, or excited about your teen applying to college? Do you know what colleges are looking for? And if your kid gets in, do you know what you'll pay for it? College admission has never been so competitive or expensive. Shellee Howard will take you on a journey to help you and your teen get college ready. Now here's your host, Shellee.

Well, hello parents. This is Shellee Howard, founder and CEO of College Ready. And today I have a wonderful guest I cannot wait to share. Welcome to the show, Dr. Joe.

Thank you, Shellee Howard. How are you?

Such a great day. I'm telling you, spring is here and students are getting ready for summer, and that makes me excited. Let's go ahead and tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what we're going to talk about on the show today.

Sure. So thank you again. My— thank you for having me. Dr. Joe, I am an educational doctor, so I'm actually have an EdD, not a PhD. It means I'm a practitioner. Doctorate is an educational leader. I've been a lifelong educator, 16+ years, first as a classroom teacher, then as administrator. I started tutoring, well, when I was teaching, but really started online tutoring during the pandemic and then went on to form my own company, which I own and operate today, Supported Tutoring, and also our nickname, Acing AP Exams, which is our exclusive Facebook group. But we help students ace their AP exams. And when we say ace, we mean 4s and 5s. We help them just crush every part of their exam so that they can earn college credit, merit-based scholarships. And get into the schools of their dreams.

So good. So parents, just, I'm gonna break it down. So Advanced Placement, right, is those hard classes your kids are talking about. There's the honors, the college prep, then there's the AP or IB or dual enrollment. We're right now, we're gonna talk about the AP exams. They're right around the corner and this is it. This is when the students wake up and go, oh my gosh. It's coming. I need to do something. So I brought on this awesome guest and we're gonna break down, is it even possible, Dr. Joe, to get a 4 or 5? Is that even a reality?

Shellee, it's not only a reality, not only possible, it is predictable. I believe if you approach it in a formulaic way and have a system to implement, you can predictably get 4s and 5s. You, you can make test day. Another walk in the park. And that's the confidence that we aim to give our students in a program.

So good. So I'm going to put on my mom's hat. I remember when my firstborn, I think he was taking 4 APs one, one year. And I was terrified. I'm thinking there's no way he's going to do great on 4 hard APs. How do you, do you break that down or how do you even start to fathom? Yes, a student can get a 4 or 5 and it could be great, but what about if you have AP Chem, AP Lit, or you know what I mean? Heavy hitters. And the student's thinking, how is it possible? Can you simplify it?

How we approach it is we start with the end in mind. We build something for our kids in the program called a game plan. So we work backwards from the test date week by week, not day by day, and give them a general outline of what they need to do. I've standardized the review process in our program kind of by accident and as a result of us expanding to serve over 27 AP subjects. More from my mental capacity of being able to track that because some AP classes have 9 units, some have 5, and everywhere in between. So I needed a system to be able to see progression across review. So the process for us is quite simple. We diagnose, we want to make sure we know where our kids' gaps are. So you're mostly just understanding what you know, what you don't know, formulating that game plan, and we're going to hit the highest impact areas first of what they don't know and really accelerate the skill development. Because the big thing is APs do not test content knowledge anymore. If you're a parent or it was in the United States and were taking it 20 years ago, APs were way more like your traditional assessments. They have all moved to skill-based exams now. So it's not what you know, it's what you can demonstrate with what you know, meaning application, analysis, evaluation. And those skills are very iterative and you have to practice them. So we review the curriculum and we practice the skills at the same time and give students feedback on their skill development before we start practice tests. But really it becomes an algebraic equation of how much practice problems can my kid get before the test in timed conditions with really good feedback. And that's the biggest gap I see with what kids do wrong instead of what they should be doing.

I have a million questions just flooding my mind. Here we go, Dr. Joe. So my first question is, are all AP exams hard? Because my child says, really, there's only 2 that are hard, mom. The rest I'm not worried about. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because the feedback I'm getting from my teenagers is not consistent, let's say.

I guess beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Really depend— I'll give the legal definition that it really depends. You know, some do come easy. Some are natural born test takers, some are not., but it is different when it's game time. When the lights come on, you know, tide goes out, you can see who's skinny dipping, right? So like, I'll tell you the last, I just, I don't believe in test anxiety, just FYI. I know it exists. Um, research was on improving mental health literacy in secondary education, but I do believe in a lack of preparation. And I think if you've never taken a cumulative exam timed, um, that pressure, it's a whole different ballgame. And so what we wanna do, excuse me, is simulate those conditions as close to game time conditions as possible so it becomes second nature. Um, it is a relative-based question because more kids take AP US History, AP Language, AP Psychology, and class— those subjects are in the half a million population-wise, whereas some of the specialty subjects, your STEM, you're hyper, like, probably less than 100,000. So the scoring averages might look different, but you gotta take the whole snapshot. Historically, AP Physics is the hardest exam to pass. Um, history used to be second. It's kind of out of it. And it goes year by year because the other thing I want your viewers to hear is that it's subjective. Mo— half of the test is subjective, meaning there is a reader reading the free response questions, which all the AP exams have. They're written responses and they're basing it off of what the established frameworks and rubrics are and giving them a score. So even the most prepared students, if they don't actually know how to kind of those problems systematically, give the readers what they want, their exam grade can fall apart and not even know it.

Yeah, that's tough. What about, I've also heard, well, I have an A in the class, why do I have to even study?

Yeah, that's the biggest misconception probably out there.

So, um, I'm asking all the good ones.

You're asking me all the good ones. I'll be very controversial on your podcast. I don't care what your grade is. Your grade actually means nothing to me. No offense. Here's why. Because your grade can literally be made up of anything the teacher wants. So, um, we probably have more grade inflation going on in this country than at any other point in time in academic history, meaning we know it's very competitive to get into top schools and we need top GPAs and teachers. If you're in affluent schools, they're, they have to like with the students and work with some parents if they can't, God forbid they see a B, right? But what is the grade measuring? It could be measuring projects. It could be measuring participation. It could be measuring homework. Is that a snapshot of a kid's learning? Probably not. I get kids in the program who are like, this is their first B. And I'm like, it's a college-level class. And they're like, but this is the first B, they can't have a B. And I dive into it and I realize the teacher's grades are primarily based on their assessments and the assessments are aligned to College Board. And that might be the best indicator of, hey, and I usually go into it like, what does the test look like? Is it like, boy, it's just memorization or do you have to like, through problems, answer stimulus-based questions? And they go, it's like that. I go, okay, you want the bad news or the Good news. Bad news is that's the AP exam. That's what it's going to look like. It's going to suck if you don't know how to learn. The good news is it's very fixable. You have to learn how to critically think, and that's usually the gap. So kids who have A's, who have no— I'm good, I got an A in AP US History— and then you bomb the exam because you didn't practice the skill set that actually gets you the scores. College Board is standardized. The grade is no indication of how well you do on the AP exam, which is very frustrating.

But what if my child is just really good at memorization? Like they memorize the AP book, right? They memorize everything in that class and they have a great memory. Shouldn't they just be able to be okay taking the AP exam?

Yeah, that's a good question too. You can't memorize your way to a 5. So you can get pretty close, but you cannot memorize your way to a 5. And I'll just give you an example from, you know, very passionate about the social studies as I was a history teacher, but You memorize every single thing in the history book, any of the histories. And then the long essay question comes in and says, to the extent to the way the French Revolution did this, right? Or evaluate the extent Napoleon impacted 20th century European governments. And okay. Like, like, you know what I mean? So like, that is a skill. You could go and read a book on how to build a deck, but it doesn't make you an expert deck builder. When you run into a problem, how do you adapt? And that's how you think critically, right? It's like in practice, I don't read IKEA directions anyway, my wife does that, but like, you actually have to get good at the skill of building, right? The same with the AP exams is that it's actually measuring something completely different. It's not measuring memorization. It's actually the lowest level of Bloom's. It's really measuring application, analysis, and evaluation, and ultimately synthesis because you're creating essays out of thin air. And so you have to develop those critical thinking skills. And I see the kids struggling that identified early of their parents, they do better on the exams. Than those kids that get blindsided that I was not ready for it.

Hmm. Speaking of that, when is the best time to start preparing for the AP exams and, uh, is my child too late?

So it's never too late, uh, unless it's the night before the exam, then it's a little too late. It's kind of like flossing the day before you go to the dentist. Uh, not going to have that big of an impact, but something is always better than nothing. No, so I'd say we're in the sweet spot for starting. You're not too late. I would say, We ideally like 8 weeks, gives us flexibility. Um, I built the program out of necessity. Just to tell you a little secret, like I was thrown into a tutoring company and they basically let go of the social studies tutor. I was given 15 students across 5 subjects with less than 8 weeks to go and said, get them all 4s and 5s. So I like had to operate under those conditions and I developed the system that we basically have used today, like really good review sessions and then followed by practice tests and then obviously If we can get more time, we do more time, but that's like a minimum requirement. So no, it's never too late. I've gotten a student ready for their APUSH exam in less than 10 days. They came to me a week before the exam, um, and she was able to get a 4. It's the process that's more important than the time. I say this a lot to teachers too, like, time is irrelevant. It's what you do with that time for maximum results. So you don't need hundreds of hours of cramming and studying. You need a process, you need a plan, and you need to execute. And you need to be held, kids need to be held accountable to it. So that's ultimately what we do. Um, Review, probably one of the top programs out there, like, is known, has guarantees, but they cut that off at 90 days. And so, um, we're inside 90 days and we can still get kids 4s and 5s if they commit to the process. So ultimately I made my program to be super flexible to adapt because some people discover us in March or April and I still want to help kids get those grades.

So good. So then I'm thinking, why did I even put my child through this stress? Like, it was bad enough they took the AP class. I saw them fight for it, stay up late at night. Do I even need them a point of them taking the AP exam?

Well, I think you could definitely educate your audience probably better than I can on this, but I'm not an adult.

Uh, I'm a parent right now.

Well, Or not optional, like, uh, helps you in 3 distinct ways. Uh, one, the elite colleges, top schools, which I think both of our audiences are always aiming for. I don't really, you also want to go to a local community college. I don't see many of those parents, not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just like, I see kids, we'll go to Harvard, we'll go to Stanford. I want to go to top schools. They're going to require top scores. So that means you're going to have an astronomically high SAT. You're going to have a good GPA, but ultimately they're stripping the weight out of that GPA anyways. And then the other indicator is going to be this national curriculum that we kind of have is the APs, and they're going to want to see 4s and 5s. That is the indication of academic rigor. No disrespect to the education system or your teacher, but an elite engineering program that has experts in physics and mathematics is not going to be super impressed by your physics grade from a high school teacher. They're going to want them to go through their program. But they do care about, hey, at the— one of the highest level exams, you got a 4 or 5. That shows you can handle the coursework work and the rigor more than anything else. So it's actually the signal— the score is a better signal to a college than the grade. So it helps you get into schools. We're both very passionate about making college as affordable or as free as possible, but it can drastically give you a return on investment in the form of scholarships, institutional-based aid, merit-based— whole part of the profile. The more APs you take, you can be an AP Scholar with Distinction or AP Scholar with Honors. That award package is going to be super sweet. Some of these very competitive schools, tens of thousands of dollars. Found this out by accident because my alma mater is University of Pittsburgh and the academic index of how they weight the award package, the difference between a 3 and a 5 in some APs is $20,000. So like for a 5 or for a 3, excuse me, $25,000 for a 5. So that's huge over multiple APs. And then college credit. Yes, some schools don't always award it or honor it in the way that we hope, but those 4s and 5s are going to get you closer to earning those college credits. I have a kid at UC Berkeley right now. He got 11 4s and 5s. He is sitting on 52 credits at UC Berkeley. So I mean, it is tremendous in what the return can be. But again, I default to you because coming up with that plan and that strategy of how to leverage these things, um, foundational, I believe, for the college planning process.

It's so great. You meet with a family and you say something to the family and the student's like, "Yeah, that's it." And the parent's like, "I've been telling you that exact same thing. I mean, listen to me," right? So when you say what I always say, I'm hoping that my families are going, "Wait a minute, this guy, he just confirmed what Shellee's been telling us, that APs are really important." And that's why, um, no reason that your child should not take the exam. The only thing that it does is a question mark in the university admissions mind of why didn't your child take the exam? Did they not do well? Did they sleep in? It leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. So a lot of people will say, well, I don't wanna pay for it, or My child's busy that weekend, or there, there's a lot of things. This is what I want families to hear. College ready, what is so critically important is the whole strategy. It's not one test. It's not one exam. It's not one class. It's not one, you know, grade. It really is the whole strategy, and APs are an important part of it, especially if you want the free money. So. Dr. Joe just did such a great job saying exactly what I tell every family is if you want your child to get in, this is what they need to do to be competitive. That's step 1, just to get in. Step 2 is once they're there, some schools will let them never have to take that subject again. They will just envelope them in and they can just start in the upper division. How fun would that be? Not never having to take English 101 again, right, parents? So they get to jump into the classes that they love. So let's talk a little bit about test day. So you're saying you're not so sure about test anxiety, and I'm saying child number 2, 110%, had test anxiety.

Yeah.

I would love to hear. What I didn't know that I could have done to help her because I did everything in my power to support her. And she said, mom, and I watched her study in groups and I would tutor. And then she said, mom, I sat down and it went blank.

Yeah.

How do you help that child?

So I'm not saying it doesn't exist just, just to be clear. I know it exists, but I do think the root cause of like the society in terms of how we're handling anxiety is we just avoid it, right? Instead of actually confronting it. So. You know, exposure therapy is how you actually overcome anxiety, facing your fears. So most kids— so first off, to understand that the AP exam is unlike how kids are usually getting tested in high school. Most of the time you do a chapter, you do a unit, you take a test, and never going to see that content again, right? We're done, moving on, don't need to forget that, throw my book out. Um, exams are cumulative over the entire year, so most We have lost that skill as a society. Most kids are not used to studying for a cumulative exam. Add into the fact that it's half of it or more is a writing component. Most content teachers, subject expert teachers, are not spending enough time teaching writing because writing is hard and we're not all writing experts. Not only are we not teaching writing, we're not spending the time to give feedback on the writing if it is done in groups. Writing is a literacy skill. It's a very iterative process. And then the third factor is there is a timing component to it. So like, I know kids are smart. I have great kids in the program. I'm sure you have great kids. They're smart. They're very high achieving. Well, that blank comes in, they open their second part of their AP History exam and there's an hour and 40 minutes on the DBQ and the LEQ, and they don't have a strategy and they spend time, they wait, they don't actually attack the DBQ, they waste time. You really only budgeted an hour for the DBQ. So what ends up happening, because that's worth 25% of their score in this hyperfocused example on history, that time bleeds into their LEQ. So they actually sacrifice points on 15% of their score because they don't have a strategy to write. And again, all those components could have been practiced many times before exam day. Your kid's class is designed to get— cover the content and be done maybe with 2 weeks to spare. I have worked with kids whose teachers don't get through the whole content. So where is the time for review? Most of your classes aren't 3 hours. Where is the time to take a timed proctored test? Doesn't exist. So we use the Steph Curry analogy, and I have to give all respect to Tony Robbins because when I heard it, it clicked for me. Like, so Steph Curry is arguably one of the best 3-point shooters that have ever lived. And if you just take his 15 years in the NBA, he says he takes 500 3-point shots every day at practice. 3,500 shots a week over 15 years is over 2 million practice 3s. It's why he makes it look automatic. In the game, he still has only made 3,000 shots. That, that's like less than 1% of the shots he's taken. It's the work you don't see. So again, if you want to be extraordinary, what is the extra that your kid is doing? And that's where I live, and that's where my 's magic happens of, I want to get my kids testing in April so that when they're, everyone else is cramming and panicking, it's like, done this 4 times, you can crush the exam. So my, my best days are texting the kids or messaging the kids after their AP exam and they say, I was so confident, I was not nervous. I was like, great. And then when the scores come out, they're so like, they, in terms of that, so that's how we attempt to eliminate test anxiety. But how you, like, there has to be some level of accountability to push the kid to be able to do it. And the, it might have the best review books and resources, and you can definitely do it on your own, but that missing component and where we come in is the feedback on what they're doing and how to get better.

And that's probably the most important part because parents, you know what you're thinking right now. The news is flashing through their computer as they're studying. They're getting beeped on their phone. They're wondering what their friends are doing. There's so much going on. How focused are they? But when they're working or being timed and have accountability, yes, there's a whole different strategy I see going on with those students. So the whole idea is to give our students the best opportunity for success. That's why we put them in pitching lessons, soccer lessons, tennis lessons, swim lessons, every kind of lesson. But what I want you to think about for a moment is this lesson of teaching them the skill to beat the test. That's what I call it. They're prepared to beat the test and it's legal and ethical. There's no cheating. You are preparing them for college. This, this is not a one and done. This is truly going to take them all the way through. My son said after he got his 5s, he felt like he could ace any college test. He got one B at Harvard and he said it was because the teacher gave one student out of 12 an A. He was okay with it. So helping your child have these skills that nobody else is gonna teach them is so critical. And so Dr. Joe's been kind enough, he's going to be working with our College Ready families and preparing them for their mindset, for the strategy. But it's, he's not just for College Ready. He could help your child too. So Dr. Joe, how would somebody get ahold of you? I know it needs to happen sooner than later, but what's the best way?

Fastest way, you can go to acnapexams.com or Supportive Tutoring. ACNAP Exams is already aligned with the AP stuff. So just acnapexams.com, you can click on a calendar to book a call with us. I think we're gonna give you a unique calendar to share with your audience so you can let us know you came in by Shellee Howard and College Ready. We have a free Facebook group, ACE and AP Exams, about 6,000 members there. But the fastest way would be ACE and, uh, aceandapeexams.com and just book a call with us, um, to start, get started.

So good. Is there any last words of advice or encouragement for the parent? I remember getting my kids mentally prepared, giving them a high carb dinner, good night's sleep, hiding their phone. What's some really good advice that you would give families?

Take a breath, breathe. Don't— you're— so it's hard. I say this, so it's— this is not the— like, we had to live through the Depression of World War II. So I want to have respect to my grandparents and know that it was very hard back then. But in terms of the— like you mentioned, the amount of distractions and both— we have put on kids in a very highly competitive environment. They don't need— they need support and the yes to As well as Shellee Howard, it's so hard to be able to talk to your kids because they don't listen to you. I know that, like, trust me, I've been educated my whole life. I don't think I could teach my oldest daughter. I'm like, I'm not, how do you listen to me? You don't listen to me at all. Sometimes a third party needs to be supportive. So, you know, holding them accountable, but putting pressure on the sake of, because it's super competitive to get in, like, if you're watching this and you're at all, or you're involved with, uh, Shellee Howard and College Ready, you've already, you've already a lot more steps than most kids or most kids and parents ever do. So first off, you should be very proud of yourselves that you're dedicating your time to actually care about your kids because so many kids don't have that luxury. So number one, you should be proud of yourself. So you are taking good steps. The second thing is, okay, not putting that pressure. If you're, again, if you're in this, in this audience, it's going to be a single school does not define your kid's success. In fact, there's an old saying that A students work for C students, right? Like, there's a whole, like, so the thing is there are so many options out there. I don't even know what the job market's going to look like in 4 years and 8 years. But the most important thing, back to what Shellee Howard said a little bit ago, the transfer skills of critical thinking and writing. If that's the only thing they walk away from in high school, the kid's going to be successful. Because if they can think, they can do. And, uh, so much of us just kind of walk through the world kind of mindless, things as they are, not AI is going to be super disruptive. I don't know what the job market is going to look like, but if your kid can think, they're going to be employable and, you know, basically having the ability to do almost anything they put their mind to. Thanks, Shellee Howard.