Is AP Italian Hard? Is AP Italian Worth Taking?

So, you're thinking of taking AP Italian but are worried that the class may be too difficult or that it may not be worth taking in the end. In this post, we'll discuss everything you need to know about the course.

Breakdown of the Exam

Before getting into more specific details about the course, let's talk about the breakdown of the AP Italian exam. The test is broken up into 2 main sections, which each have different subsections:

Section 1A: Multiple Choice ⚪⚪⚪⚫

• Interpretive Communication: You answer 30 questions about different written materials in 40 minutes. Section 1B: Multiple Choice with Audio ⚪⚪⚪⚫ 🔊

• Print and Audio Texts and Interpretive Communication: You answer 35 questions about the content of audio and print sources in 55 minutes.

Section 2A: Free Response Written ✏️

• Interpersonal Writing: You have 15 minutes to write a response to an email.
• Presentational Writing: You have 55 minutes (15 minutes of reading time and 40 minutes for writing) to write an argumentative essay using 3 different sources.

Section 2B: Free Response Spoken 💬

• Interpersonal Speaking: You reply to a speaker in a simulated conversation 5 times for 20 seconds each.
• Presentational Writing: You give a 2-minute presentation that compares an aspect of Italian society to that of another community.

How Hard is AP Italian?

The first thing that we can look at to determine the difficulty of the course is the exam's score distributions.

Score Distributions

As you can see, a majority of test takers get a 3 because an almost even mix of native and nonnative speakers take the AP Italian exam every year. You shouldn't be worried if you're a nonnative speaker. It's completely possible to get a 5 with proper studying and hard work!

To get a feel for the difficulty of the course and the exam, we asked a former AP Italian student Kallie about what she believed were the easiest and hardest sections.

She found the free-response to be the easiest section of the exam:

"There are different tricks that students can learn to maximize their points on the free-response section, like using certain sentence stems and vocabulary words from each unit."

"The prompts on the free-response section tend to be very open-ended, and because of this, there's a little wiggle room when responding."

And she found anything with audio to be the most difficult:

"Listening can be difficult because if you miss a word or don't know the meaning of one, it can be hard to understand what the speaker is saying. Also, the audio is only allowed to be played a certain amount of times during the test, which why it's important to take lots of notes while listening!"

"When doing any audio parts, you have to think on your feet and try to figure out which answer option best fits what you listened to. And this all happens while you're listening to the audio play."

So, Is AP Italian Worth Taking?

Absolutely, for both native and nonnative speakers! Getting a passing score on the exam can grant you college credit at many universities and place you out introductory courses. Knowing a language fluently is a useful skill to have in real life, especially if you plan on going into teaching Italian, international relations, business, tech, etc.

If you've decided that taking AP Italian is the right choice for you, here are some tips from the same student we interviewed before:

"Start studying and practicing early! Even if that means watching TV shows and movies, reading newspapers, or listening to music in Italian. Any type of immersion will be beneficial in the long run."

"Learn as much as you can about core Italian values (religious traditions, work ethics, the importance of family, etc) as you go through each of the units."

Hopefully, you found this post useful as you try to figure out whether AP Italian is worth taking. Regardless of whether you end up taking the course, hopefully the tips above will come in handy as you study for other AP language exams or language classes in the future. In bocca al lupo! 🐺