Condensed versions of the school’s two most intimidating textbooks, AP Biology (a whopping 55 chapters) and AP U.S. History (over a thousand pages), may soon accompany the courses’ new, condensed curricula.

The College Board is announcing new curricula this year for the most popular two AP classes, Biology and U.S. History. The proposed revisions will decrease the breadth of information tested on AP exams in the next few years, allowing the classes to focus more on overarching concepts. The changes are part of a “New AP” plan that’ll also reorganize two language exams next year: AP French and AP German. AP Biology teacher Melanie Toth said she anticipates the curriculum changes will result in fewer detail-oriented lessons and more creative, student-designed labs.

“We meet 90 minutes, five days a week, and even then it’s difficult to get through everything,” she said. “It’s too much information. It needs to be cut down.”

The revised AP Biology exam debuts in May 2013 and will reflect the curriculum shift. The number of multiple-choice questions on the exam will be halved, and the number of free-response questions will increase.

For AP U.S. History, the College Board pushed back its release of the curriculum from February to this fall, and the new exam will take effect in May 2014. The revised history curriculum will focus more on pre-colonial times and modern events after 1980, but specific details about the course’s content haven’t been released yet.

The proposed changes shouldn’t lower the difficulty of the class, which students can take for college credit, AP U.S. History teacher Greg Herbert said.

Although she finds AP U.S. History to be time-consuming, sophomore Irene Solaiman said she likes the current course structure.

“The changes aren’t completely necessary,” she said. “I don’t think the amount of information we have to know is too much. It’s a lot to do, but it’s not overwhelming.”

AP Biology and U.S. History teachers will also receive structured curriculum outlines, instead of the current list of possible terms that the exam may test students on.

“The curriculum framework delineates between required and optional content; identifies various approaches to covering essential knowledge; points out connections and overlap among concepts; and indicates how the content relates to the exam,” the College Board website reported.

Toth said she’s still waiting to see sample questions to determine how much of an impact the curriculum changes will have on the course.

“They’re going to have to give more specifics on what they want cut, because this is too vague,” she said. “They’re going to have to show us sample questions to see how it’s changed and how the level of detail has been modified.”

Although she’ll edit her course plans to align with the College Board’s changes, Toth said she’d still teach what she thinks is necessary. One possible change she disagrees with is cutting material studied in regular and honors chemistry at Whitman, she said.

“The things that they’ve said they’re going to cut, I don’t think they should cut,” she said. “I would teach it anyway.”