I’m a high school sophomore at a competitive high school in the Northeast. I plan on taking 10 AP classes in my high school career (1 in 10th, 4 in 11th, 5 in 12th) but other top students at my school will be taking about 12 APs because they do not do art or music as one of their elective spots. After 10th grade, I will have a 4.3 GPA and am aiming to apply to colleges like Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Duke. Taking more APs will not help my GPA because my school limits the amount of AP weighting (4.667) students can get per year which is 2 in 10th, 3 in 11th, and 4 in 12th. Will continuing to do orchestra hurt me when top colleges compare me to other peers in terms of difficulty of schedule or will a difference at this high a number of APs not matter? Thanks in advance for any input.
The difference between 10 and 12 is negligible. Just make sure you stay on a rigorous path. Orchestra won’t hurt you and may help if you win an award. I’d vote that you stay on the course you’ve described.
Conventional wisdom here is that six are sufficient and that diminishing returns set in after that. As long as your guidance counselor can check the “most rigorous” box on your recommendation, ten should be sufficient.
ECs also matter and if you enjoy orchestra, I think you should continue with it.
As the (former?) admissions director at MIT says, “Would you be taking those APs anyway, if they had no benefit to college admissions?” If your answer is yes, then by all means take them. But if you’re taking them ONLY because you think it will help you get into college, then no, do not take them.
May depend on which two are the extra ones. Ten APs that are missing English and calculus (for a student in the math track that could lead to calculus) may be seen as odd.
No, the adcoms should see that orchestra is taking up a slot that an AP could be in and that won’t count against you.
No.