Despite how difficult it still is, I think AP courses have helped me out a lot. Especially the essay questions that are a part of a lot of AP tests. Having spent hours writing practice AP essays, I haven't had any difficulty at all procuring the amount of material necessary to answer essay questions here, where a lot of the kids will tell you that you need to write as much as possible. You get more time here per question than you would for an AP test essay question, so if you've done AP, it's really nothing to stress about.

Also, a lot of schools are starting to implement multiple choice questions into their testing and examination patterns. If you've taken a couple of AP tests, you should be really well prepared for them in terms of test-taking strategies. For example, in the Stage that I recently took at KE, they gave us 20 minutes for 15 multiple choice questions, and I was done in about 5-6 mins because I was used to the AP pace of spending less than a minute on each question since the AP people usually have time limits like 25 minutes for 30 questions and stuff like that.

The difficulty here isn't so much the system itself as it is time management and the amount of material there is to study. All the material is so new that you feel like you're cut short on time and that you can't possibly learn it all. Once you've learned it though, taking the actual tests isn't THAT bad.