Forest Trail Academy offers Advanced Placement Courses. Please be cognizant that we offer the courses and NOT the test. You may register directly for the test with College Board at http://www.collegeboard.org/.

AP Calculus AB This course is designed to prepare students to earn advanced placement or credit in college mathematics and to be successful in their collegiate mathematics studies. The material covered in this six-month course is designed to parallel an introductory college calculus curriculum.

Students electing to take AP Calculus should meet the requirements as outlined in the College Board Calculus Course Description: four years of secondary mathematics; knowledge of properties, algebra, and graphs of functions; language of functions; and values of trigonometric functions.

AP Government and Politics: United States  The AP United States Government and Politics course is designed to provide the student with an experience equivalent to a one-semester college introductory course. Students will be expected to move beyond factual recall into critical analysis of the creation, function, and process of government. As stated in the College Board 2010 course description, this course will:

give students an analytical perspective on government and politics in the United States. This course includes both the study of general concepts used to interpret U.S. government and politics and the analysis of specific examples. It also requires familiarity with the various institutions, groups, beliefs, and ideas that constitute U.S. government and politics . . .  students should become acquainted with the variety of theoretical perspectives and explanations for various behaviors and outcomes.

AP Computer Science A This course is intended to serve both as an introductory course for computer science majors and as a course for people who will major in other disciplines that require significant involvement with technology. It is not a substitute for the usual college-preparatory mathematics courses.

Pre-requisites: The necessary prerequisites for entering the AP Computer Science A course include knowledge of basic algebra and experience in problem solving. A student in the AP Computer Science A course should be comfortable with functions and the concepts found in the uses of functional notation, such as f(x) 5 x 1 2 and f(x) 5 g(h(x)). It is important that students and their advisers understand that any significant computer science course builds upon a foundation of mathematical reasoning that should be acquired before attempting such a course.

AP English Language and Composition This course engages students in becoming skilled readers of prose written in a variety of rhetorical contexts, and in becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes. Both their writing and their reading should make students aware of the interactions among a writer’s purposes, audience expectations, and subjects, as well as the way genre conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing.

AP English Literature and Composition This course engages students in the careful reading and critical analysis of imaginative literature. Through the close reading of selected texts, students deepen their understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. As they read, students consider a work’s structure, style and themes, as well as such smaller-scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone.

AP Statistics The purpose of the AP course in statistics is to introduce students to the major concepts and tools for collecting, analyzing and drawing conclusions from data.

Students are exposed to four broad conceptual themes:

1 .  Exploring Data: Describing patterns and departures from patterns.

2 .  Sampling and Experimentation: Planning and conducting a study.

3 . Anticipating Patterns: Exploring random phenomena using probability and simulation.

4 .  Statistical Inference: Estimating population parameters and testing hypotheses.

Pre-requisites: The AP Statistics course is an excellent option for any secondary school student who has successfully completed a second-year course in algebra and who possesses sufficient mathematical maturity and quantitative reasoning ability.

AP U.S. History This course is designed to provide students with the analytic skills and factual knowledge necessary to deal critically with the problems and materials in U .S .history. The program prepares students for intermediate and advanced college courses by making demands upon them equivalent to those made by full-year introductory college courses. Students should learn to assess historical materials—their relevance to a given interpretive problem, reliability, and importance—and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship.

AP World History The purpose of the AP World History course is to develop greater understanding of the evolution of global processes and contacts in different types of human societies. This understanding is advanced through a combination of selective factual knowledge and appropriate analytical skills. The course highlights the nature of changes in global frameworks and their causes and consequences, as well as comparisons among major societies. It emphasizes relevant factual knowledge, leading interpretive issues, and skills in analyzing types of historical evidence.