Nowhere in writing do the words “easy” and “AP” appear in the same sentence; however among Staples students, these polar opposites often mesh into one common oxymoron: “easy AP.”

While some classes are dubbed with this title for eternity, others tend to move up and down in supposed ranking.

James D’Amico, Social Studies Department Chair, said that the difficulty of an AP course “primarily depends on the student’s level of interest in the subject and on what the demands of the AP curriculum for a course are.”

While students and teachers agree that the difficulty of a class is always relative, certain courses seem to be continuously followed by a cloudy stigma of rank.

“Some classes have a heavier workload than others,” Rebecca Zlatkin ’15 said. “In some classes, if you keep up with the work and study, you can do well, whereas in others, it is very difficult to do well.”

D’Amico agreed that certain courses “demand” more outside work than others, making them often interpreted as being harder classes. For example, AP World History consists of more out of class writing than other courses, such as AP Government.

However, AP World History, which is often mentioned as the hardest social studies AP, had one of the highest percentages of students getting A’s and B’s.

While there are certain disparities, when subjective titles of rank begin to flow through the halls of Staples and creep into the minds of students, the reality of the classes often come as a shock.

“I thought AP Government was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be,” said Olivia Jones ’15, “It was a lot more challenging than I expected.”

Simply due to the culture of Staples, there are many students of varying skill levels taking AP classes, so there are always hundreds of different opinions floating through the school about each particular class.

“I think students all too often follow some bad advice about ‘needing’ AP courses and end up taking courses that they are not truly interested in,” said D’Amico.

“Don’t register for courses based on someone else’s opinion.”