It’s Test Time : Education: Thousands of high school students are struggling through long exams to earn college credits. Not everyone says it’s a good idea.

The city’s brightest students this week are engaged in a rite of passage peculiar to their lot: the advanced placement or AP examination.

Fighting the usual springtime distractions, several thousand students in the Los Angeles Unified School District have for the past few weeks been poring over math formulas, writing essays and memorizing endless lists of words and definitions in preparation for the college-level exams.

At Van Nuys High School, which has the most students taking AP tests of any Los Angeles school, sophomores on Tuesday emerged from the three-hour biology exam dazed but mostly triumphant.

“It was pretty hard,” said Amy Kim, 16, after emerging from the school gym, where 103 classmates also took the test. “But I think I did OK.”

Sam Merians, 16, said the short-answer questions were “mind-boggling. But the essays were easier than I expected,” he said.

Those passing the tests earn between four and eight college credits in as many as 29 subjects ranging from calculus to fine arts. For most students, a passing grade means they can skip introductory college courses in the subject. Although any student paying the $65 fee can take the tests, many prepare by enrolling in high school courses specially designed to assist them in passing.

But more than college credit is often at stake.

Bob Takano, who has been teaching the biology AP course at Van Nuys for 10 years, said: “The AP biology test is a rite of passage among the magnet students. Until they pass, their sense of truly belonging and being competitive has not crystallized.”

Not everyone agrees the exams are a good idea.

Van Nuys high school magnet coordinator Joan Martin said many students wrongly believe “to be somebody you have to take an AP exam.” After grading English AP essay tests at the request of the test administrators, Educational Testing Services of Princeton, N.J., Martin said she questions their value, especially for students pressured into taking the exam.

“I had one essay that was in the form of a suicide note,” Martin recalled. “It said, ‘By the time you read this I’ll be gone, so don’t bother.’ Another wrote, ‘I’m stupid, I’m stupid and this proves it.’ ”

Most of the Van Nuys students taking the tests are enrolled in the school’s math and science magnet, which draws some of the district’s brightest minds. For those students, the biology AP exam is usually followed in later years by tests in calculus, physics and U.S. history.

One Van Nuys senior, Kenneth Haraikawa, will finish his sixth AP test this week--a mental gantlet of computer science, economics, English, art history, physics and government. Last year he passed the calculus and chemistry exams but failed U.S. history.

“My days are pretty full,” said Haraikawa, who starts at UCLA this fall and describes himself as a B student. “This week I have a government AP and a swim meet on the same day.”

By Friday, when the last tests are completed, more than 700 Van Nuys High students will have taken AP exams in 23 subjects.

Recognition of the tests increased following release of the 1988 movie “Stand and Deliver,” the story of Garfield High School math teacher Jaime Escalante and his class of mostly Latino Eastside students struggling to pass the calculus AP exam.

Most educators say peer pressure, and pressure from parents, is most responsible for increasing the number of AP exams given in Los Angeles from about 4,000 in 1981 to 9,371 last year. About 62% of the tests last year were given passing grades.

The exams are a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy picture in the Los Angeles district, where about one-third of the students drop out. Of those who graduate, about 20% go on to a four-year California public college.