Its a thrill to announce the high achievements of our Senior Year students!
For the past 2 school years at EtonHouse International School Suzhou, China we have offered the Advance Placement Program which is a course developed in the United States of America for high school students to gain placement and course credit for universities all over the world who obtain high scores above a certain number on the examinations.
The Advance Placement curriculum is first year university level created for the College Board by a panel of experts and college-level educators in each subject. The AP programs that EtonHouse has run over the past 2 years have been in Biology, Studio Art: 2D design and Drawing, Japanese Language and Culture, Chinese Language and Culture, English Language and Composition, Statistics and Macroeconomics. The Advance Placement exams are scored on a 1 to 5 scale and many of our students since introducing this curriculum have scored top marks which are a great achievement for the school, its teachers and students. The AP programs of Chinese Language and Culture and Studio Art have seen students score 5 in the two years of the courses being offered. In addition, completing AP courses help students qualify for various types of scholarships.
According to the College Board, 31 percent of colleges and universities look at AP experience when making scholarship decisions. Over the 2 years we’ve been running the AP program here at EtonHouse we have seen all our students who sat for the AP Chinese Language and Culture exams and Studio Art, pass with a score of 3 or more.
The two senior students who are going to showcase are Taiwanese AP Mandarin student, Edith Tseng Chen and AP Studio Art Dutch student, Renee Langendonk.
The Advance Placement Studio Art portfolios are designed for students who are seriously interested in the practical experience of art. Students are challenged to develop their own personal work and mastery of concept, composition and execution of their personal ideas and themes. AP Studio Art is not based on written exams, instead students submit their portfolio for evaluation at the end of the school year.
The structure of the portfolio is in 2 sections; Quality permits the student to select the works that best exhibit a synthesis of form, technique and content that best demonstrates excellence. The Concentration component is where the student produces 12 consecutive pieces of work that make a coherent visual statement about the development of a theme or concept. In the Breadth section the student is asked to demonstrate a serious grounding in visual principles and material techniques. Renee Langendonk completed the AP Studio Art in 2D design in one year, scoring 5, the highest point score.
The Advance Placement Mandarin course has become more and more popular every year. According to the AP Chinese course is comparable to a fourth-semester or equivalent college course in Mandarin Chinese. The AP Mandarin exam test vote language skills and cultural knowledge.
Each section of the exam tests interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational language skills. The exam does not explicitly test grammatical knowledge, but rather integrates grammatical knowledge into the language skills that are tested. The AP exam not only assesses your communication skills, but also evaluates your knowledge of Chinese customs, history, literature, art and society.
The AP Chinese Language and Culture exam is divided into four sections: Listening- primarily assesses your interpretive communication skills, Reading- the raiding sections include a wide range of stimulus types such as advertisements, notes, posters, articles, signs, e-mail, etc. Speaking- the speaking part of the exam is divided into Simulated Conversation and Cultural Presentation and Writing: The writing part of the exam assesses interpersonal and presentational communication skills.
The exam tests your ability to interpret the problem(s) presented in the prompt, analyse the problem(s) and come up with solutions or suggestions, All the students who have sat the AP Mandarin exams under Ms Wang here at EtonHouse have passed with one student scoring a 3 and the others scoring 5.
According to the AP College Board, “AP Exam grades of 5 are equivalent to grades in the corresponding university courses.”