American teens have finally found some sort of value in the tornado of news surrounding YouTuber, Influencer, and beauty blogger James Charles: source material.
Students in the US sat their AP English exams on Wednesday, the end to a rigorous program American high school students are offered that hits them with college-level learnings through the year. Many US colleges offer course credit, or placement, to students who score well on these extra tests.
I RANTED ABOUT JAMES CHARLES FOR MY AP ESSAY IM CRYING #APenglish
— taila (@tailalee) May 15, 2019
While outside discussion of the specific essay question is prohibited by the college board, that hasn’t stopped stopped a wave of students from taking to Twitter to tell everyone what they wrote about. A pretty quick reading would tell you that the topics of celebrity and “being overrated” were key components of whatever prompt was given, and the end result seems to have been a lot of essays about James Charles.
For those still catching up: James Charles is a 19-year-old Youtuber followed by at least 13 million people. Until a few days ago, that figure was a few million higher, but has dramatically dropped ever since his former mentor and fellow YouTuber Tati Westbrook ended any association with him and levied several problematic accusations against him.
“The James Charles scandal is such a big deal right now and everyone knows so much about it that it just seemed like one of those topics that would be easy to write in detail about,” a student named Maya told PEDESTRIAN.TV. “I know so much about it I might as well use it for something lmao.”
Another student, Anna, said she spoke with several people after the exams who had written about Charles. “They defined James Charles as ‘overrated’ since many people are jumping in and unsubscribing and no longer being a supporter,” she said.
“He has gotten so many new people interested in him because of this scandal and although he is losing followers, he’s getting more people noticing him than he is actually worthy of because his scandal of being a predator and doing undesirable things, he’s not really worth all this turmoil and attention, so therefore is overrated.”
Rushing to social media after finishing the exam, students figured out pretty quickly they weren’t the only ones who had thought to discuss James Charles’ very bad week.
“AS SOON as I got home from AP testing today, I immediately went to twitter to look for memes and funny tweets about this exam,” said Anna.
college board reading everyone’s argument essays about James Charles #APLang pic.twitter.com/V14SWCzCqq
— alison🧸 (@magicalbigsis) May 15, 2019
https://twitter.com/yoongifried/status/1128760866898243584
The AP graders all learning about the James Charles drama from all our argument essays #APlang #aplangexam pic.twitter.com/Qx6E3ZDhC0
— joe (@AWanderingGhost) May 15, 2019
Some students even went into the exam with James Charles on the mind, knowing they’d have to make an argument of some kind and (rightfully) also knowing that YouTube drama is always interesting to someone.
me walking into the ap lang exam tomorrow ready to write about the james charles/tati scandal as an example in my argument essay pic.twitter.com/hdqmdGqzgO
— maya | i’m a creep i’m a weirdo era (@mayalinj) May 15, 2019
The collegeboard reading my, now their 115th, essay referencing james charles #aplangmemes pic.twitter.com/qkQ7Q8wWo3
— crackhead cat (@greasyeve) May 15, 2019
The essays have all been written and will now be graded by some probably initially confused and then very tired professional graders. Until then, I like to believe that all of these submissions received top marks.
