Ladue High School offers a wide variety of classes. If students want, they can take anything from Painting I to Calculus III. Of course, some classes are far more difficult than others. Those tougher classes force students to work incredibly hard to maintain a solid grade. In the eyes of many students, Advanced Placement (AP) World History is the most difficult class Ladue has to offer.

AP World is a class offered to students as they go into their sophomore year. For a lot of these students, it is their first time taking an AP class.

“It’s a lot of work and people aren’t used to it,” sophomore Sammy Leary said.

Because the workload in AP World is much greater than the workload given in U.S. Studies, the required freshman history class, sophomore students taking AP World must adjust to all the extra work. AP World students do a greater amount of work outside of the classroom and the unit tests are also far more difficult.

This past summer, the director of the AP program stated that the AP World course was never intended for sophomores because of the rigor. Even so, sophomores in different school districts all over St. Louis are enrolled in this challenging class. In fact, 87% of students who take the class are sophomores.

“It’s a lot of work, especially for a sophomore to take on,” senior Ali Fedder said.

Eric Hahn, the teacher of the class, assigns the students an average of 10-­15 pages from the textbook to read in between each class. The students have the option of taking notes on the reading, which they can use on daily reading quizzes.

“It’s a lot of outside work, it’s a lot of self-taught work, and it’s a lot of reading,” Fedder said. “It’s a fun class, going to it isn’t something you dread, but it’s still a lot of work.”

AP World covers a lot of information and the syllabus is full of many different topics. The class covers everything from the beginning of human civilization to modern times.

“It is a challenging course, a lot of information is given that’s unfamiliar,” Hahn said. “There is very little prior knowledge of the topic.”

Students taking AP World also have the option of taking an AP exam on the information covered in the class. The AP test takes place sometime in May each year.

“We feel like it’s already hard, even before we take the class, but Dr. Hahn prepares us very well for the AP test,” junior Ting Ding said.