Author: paige laevy

When most students take the AP World History exam, the first thing they notice about the structure is that it is lengthier than they anticipated. Three and a half hours. Four separate parts. Two pieces of writing. There is a ten-minute intermission that sounds relaxing but, in reality, is primarily used to calculate how much time remains for the Document-Based Question. In addition to covering over 800 years of world history, from 1200 CE to the present, the AP World History: Modern exam requires students to show that they can assess sources, formulate arguments, and write under time constraints. It…

The answer to the question of which GCSE exam is scheduled for tomorrow, a Saturday night in June, is unquestionably none. In England, GCSE exams take place Monday through Friday in May and June. Weekends are completely off the schedule, so pupils have at least two days between the end of one exam week and the beginning of the next. This Saturday, June 7, 2026, falls between the fourth and fifth weeks of the summer exam series, which started on May 4. If you use the window, it seems valuable; if you stare at the question instead of using the…

If you’ve been studying for the AP Psychology exam, the first thing you notice when you enter the testing room is that the laptop in front of you is the only item on the desk. No calculator, no formula sheet, and no paper booklet. There are just 102 questions, two hours of time, and Bluebook between you and your preferred activities on that Tuesday morning in May. In contrast to the three-hour marathons required for AP Calculus or AP US History, the AP Psych exam is only two hours long by AP standards, which tends to give students a false…

A laptop running the Bluebook app and a paper exam booklet sitting side by side on the desk are the first things you see when you enter a testing room for the AP Precalculus exam. The most obvious indication that this exam is designed differently from most of what students have prepared for is the combination of digital and analog in one sitting. The answer to how long it runs is three hours. However, the three hours are divided into four separate parts that alternate between using a calculator and not using one, as well as between typing answers onto…

Settle into a testing room for the AP Computer Science Principles exam and the situation is straightforward on the surface: three hours, Bluebook app open on a laptop, 70 multiple-choice questions followed by four written-response questions about a project you’ve been building since September. For three hours. That explains the length of the AP CSP exam. However, stating “three hours” without elaborating on its structure is like to stating that a play is ninety minutes long, which is technically correct but leaves out the majority of the experience. The test is divided into two parts with significantly differing requirements. The…

An AI chatbot was used as a discussion partner when a philosophy professor at Ohio State asked his students to write about ethics. One of them returned with a paper about the custom of returning shopping carts and karma. He referred to it as one of his favorites. That little, somewhat ridiculous, strangely human detail reveals more about Ohio State’s true goals than any official statement could. The university declared last year that all of its undergraduate students, regardless of major, would have to become “bilingual”—fluent in both their primary field of study and the real-world applications of artificial intelligence…

No language course teaches a certain type of fluency. Sitting at a kitchen table in Queens, Glendale, or Houston, assisting a parent with a medical form or a lease renewal, and discovering early on that working in two registers at once is not a burden but rather a skill are all examples of how it develops over years of translating not just words but entire worlds. That ability has become the cornerstone of something much greater for an increasing number of second-generation Americans. According to Forbes research, most of America’s privately held billion-dollar startup companies were founded or co-founded by…

The same awkward advice was given to immigrant parents sitting in pediatricians’ waiting rooms across America for decades: speak English at home. The argument, presented with clinical assurance, was that exposing a child to two languages simultaneously would cause them to become confused, delay their speech, and regress academically. Quietly, parents who brought their native tongue from abroad were instructed to leave it at the door. Many of them paid attention. A few of them still feel bad about it. Now, without much fanfare, that advice is being walked back. The medical community, especially pediatricians who work closely with multilingual…

One type of difficulty that doesn’t make the news is the one that occurs in quiet, small rooms between a client and a therapist who are both struggling to find the right words. This challenge has been developing for years in the Arabic-speaking communities of London, and the practitioners caught in the middle are the ones who comprehend it the best. What bilingual Arabic-English therapists already know from experience—that language in the therapy room is never neutral—has started to be mapped by research emerging from British clinical settings. It is heavy. It conveys either inclusion or exclusion. It has the…

Speaking a second language at work used to be considered an amusing side note on a resume, something that might be discussed during office happy hour but was rarely taken into consideration when making a hiring decision. That is no longer the case, and the change has happened more quickly than most people realize. These days, bilingualism isn’t just a soft credential at the bottom of a LinkedIn profile. It has subtly risen to the top of the list in numerous industries. This is fairly evident from the numbers. Typically, bilingual workers make between 5% and 20% more than their…