By Katelynn Luu
Fountain Valley High School offers a variety of honors and Advanced Placement (AP) classes to help students challenge themselves in the subject areas they are passionate about. In the summer of 2022, 11 of these classes assigned summer homework for students to complete.
The reasons for assigning summer homework vary from class to class, but most AP classes have one in common: they must cover a vast amount of material in time for the AP test in May.
“School starts pretty late here compared to elsewhere in California, but the AP exam is on the same day in May for everyone,” AP Physics teacher Debbie Dickinson said. “[The summer assignment] eliminates an entire chapter of review… and lets us get right on to the new material that [students] need to learn.”
Additionally, teachers utilize summer assignments to prepare the students with the skills they need in order to succeed in the rigorous AP and honors classes.
“The most important aspect of the assignment is students sharpening their skills before the grades count for real,” AP Chemistry teacher Michael Olsberg said. “The best effect of the summer homework is that the students are prepared and ready to take on the challenges of AP Chemistry.”
Baron Banner conducted a survey on Google Forms to understand how students feel about summer homework and received 54 responses. It asked students to rate how beneficial the summer homework is for every class on a scale of one to five, one being no benefit and five being very beneficial.
| Class | Number of Students who rated the summer assignment as either four or five | Number of Student Responses |
| AP Lang | 25.9% | 31 |
| AP Euro | 40.2% | 34 |
| AP Comp Sci | 33.4% | 3 |
| AP Physics | 20% | 5 |
| AP Bio | 71.5% | 14 |
| AP Chem | 71.4% | 7 |
| English Honors 2 | 6.2% | 32 |
| AP Spanish | 53.9% | 13 |
For AP Chemistry, 71.4% of students classified the summer assignment as a four or five. AP Biology and AP Spanish students also believed that the assignments were beneficial in their respective classes, mostly rating them either four or five.
“I do feel like certain assignments are necessary, for example, Mrs. Barro’s [AP Biology] assignment, ” said junior Beth Arshagouni. “She had to do a summer assignment so she could get a head start in the year to ensure there would be enough time to get through all the material before the AP exam.”
On the other hand, students had a different response to summer homework in the subject of English.
For the English Honors 2 summer homework, 6.2% of students rated the assignment a four or five. 25.8% of students classified the AP Language and Composition homework as a four or five.
The objective of the AP Language and Composition summer assignment is to “engage with texts that will prepare [students] for the concepts and skills taught in AP Language and Composition,” and to “prepare them for the kind of reading and thinking [students will] be doing in [the class].”
However, the response from students in the survey suggests that they do not find a lot of benefit in the summer assignment. These low ratings greatly differ from other AP and honors classes that received more support in summer assignments; few classes outside the subject of English received a similar response.
“I feel like the summer homework for AP Lang gave me a good preview of what we were going to focus on over the course of the year, and it was also a good review,” said junior Vy Nguyen. “However, I feel like not doing the summer homework wouldn’t be harmful to a student, especially in my class where the teacher works on such concepts with us during class time, so it is a bit unnecessary.”
English teacher and Huntington Beach Union High School District English Language Arts Facilitator David Theriault explained this contrast between English and the other subjects.
“English is a skills-based course… you can kind of pass the English class without even taking the class,” Theriault said. “You just read and you write… I don’t think [summer homework] is really necessary in English.”
The need to prepare for AP exams with a later start to the school year is a major factor in the assigning of summer homework, in addition to the difficulty of the AP and honors classes.
While some students appreciate the additional preparation summer assignments provide in some classes, they may also have concerns over the value of summer homework in subjects such as English.
