^^^^ I knew that wasn’t right. Thank you.
My son’s school only allows their students to take honors and AP if they are receiving a 93 or above in a regular class, unless they get permission from the teacher. That seems to be a reasonable rule. If you’re not getting an A in a regular class, why on earth would you take an honors/AP class?
@Megan12 I think it is an unreasonable rule. B and C students are just as capable of producing good work and learning something from an AP class as an A student. It seems rather elitist and exclusionary to me. Not to mention there is value to an AP class beyond the academics. It teaches discipline, study habits, often the best teachers are AP teachers, the peer group is different. It’s not all about the GPA…
Was at an Ivy info session recently and they answered the question by saying it’s best to get an A in the AP.
That being said, if you are aiming for competitive but not the tippy top schools, they like to see kids challenging themselves and likely would prefer a B+ in an AP to an A in regular
What I don’t understand is if AP courses are intended to be equivalent to first year university level courses why are so many students taking AP courses let alone in grades 9 & 10? Why is it even assumed that every student is capable of doing university level work in high school? Certainly I can understand a percentage of students being sufficiently advanced to do so, but not for that to be the norm. I agree that for the most part if you can’t get an A in a regular course, why would you take AP? Now granted I live in Canada and our university admissions process for most schools/programs is entirely grades based. We don’t have to balance grades vs rigour and find the best combination. The majority of schools here don’t even offer AB/IB/DE, though it is growing.
DS19’s high school is one of only a few in our board that does offer AP courses (there are also a few that offer IB). At his school it is a contained regional program which means that it is open to all students in the school board to apply but acceptance is by selection only.
The way the program works is grades 9-11 are considered Pre-AP and it accelerates the regular university stream (what you would consider honours level) in their 5 core courses in grades 9 & 10 (English, Math, Science, French, Geography/History), and then they can choose which courses they want to continue in grade 11 based on which AP exams they intend to write. By the end of grade 11 they have completed the full grade 12 curriculum in their chosen courses having compacted 4 years into 3. Then they take the AP courses for grade 12 (there are only 2 courses that are available as grade 11 credit - AP US History and AP English Lang & Comp). It doesn’t mean that you are restricted to taking the AP courses in grade 12, but in order to take them you have to first have completed the prerequisite Pre-AP courses first. You can’t just opt to take AP Stats in grade 10 without having first completed grade 11 Pre-AP math. They haven’t had to institute a minimum grade requirement since students aren’t going to opt for AP courses if it’s going to result in lower marks and also because since the program is selective class averages for most courses tend to be in the 90’s anyway (with the exception of English which is why many students are opting not to continue take English at the AP level after grade 10).
Yes, it is always best to get an A in an AP, and obviously everyone would if they could. The Ivy officer should have further admitted that due to overwhelming applicants, anything less than an A in an AP is probably not a serious candidate for those schools. But for those applicants not aiming for the very top schools, it is a serious trade-off for students of rigor vs. Grade protection.
I think bigger schools that have a wide range of students, need APs to distinguish the really talented students from others. In smaller schools where the range of kids can be tighter, there is a trend to offer less APs or do away with them altogether, and at a lot of those types of schools there were limited APs to begin with and none or few in 9th and 10th grades
I’m intrigued. What is “regular calculus” at your D’s HS? How can it be any slower than Calc AB, which is already half a year of Calc taught over a full year?
@bluebayou I took Calc AB and BC highschool and my senior year my school added a Calculus Honors course, and when I asked my teacher about how it differed from us in AB she said it basically is the same course as AB they just move a lot slower than we did in AB (for reference we finished the AB course in March and spent the rest of the time reviewing for the exam) and also they don’t learn/practice the FRQs AP kids have to do. I’m not sure how it works for other schools but that’s how they offered it at my school.
Many first year college courses are general survey courses, and rather easy for those who can memorize stuff.
(Before the masses jump up and retort that US Hist AP is nothing like the first year history class at Yale, just remember that, while undoubtedly true, AP also counts for the regular kids who attend Cal State or SUNY or (fill in your state directional college name.)
Thanks for the info.
Personally, I think that is both sad and a waste of tax payer dollars. To be ready for Calc as a Junior, ‘process’, you were obviously one of the more advanced math students. (The vast majority of kids don’t see calc until college.) It just doesn’t make pedagogical or economic sense to slow kids like you down. Better, IMO, to take a course like AP Stats, (extremely useful in the real world btw), and then BC.
But then, I’m not curriculum czar. 
@bluebayou Although my school offered AP Stats it was recommend for those who were basically not that great in math but also wanted to take an AP Math. AP Calc AB/BC were seen as the classes to take if you were truly proficient in math and wanted to take it for the sake of knowledge not because you want the AP credit. Plus it was the highest level of math offered at my school so I didn’t really have an options lol.
re posts #22 and 24. No, B and C students are NOT as capable as the A students. AP is meant to offer more than the regular HS curriculum. The A students will more easily handle the material most likely because they most likely have more ability. There may be the bored gifted student who underperforms and gets lower grades but for the most part there are ability reasons for students to excel or not. Just learning something does not justify taking a course- the student will likely learn more in a slower paced class and be better prepared for the next one.
We NEED elitism and exclusion in education to best serve the best students. No watering down subjects so all can participate. All students are NOT created equally. There are two halves to the Bell curve, not just the side with the low end abilities.
AP classes are only equivalent to mediocre college courses. Remember half need to be above and half below average (or mean depending on what is being measured). The material covered may be equivalent to some college’s courses but certainly not all. UW-Madison’s regular calculus sequence is one example- they recommend starting with the beginning course for those who pass the AP calc exam because most will have trouble with the second course. Also note I said regular, the Honors sequence is different (more theory than problem based as well).
No reason to not offer true AP classes to every grade HS student. Some are capable of the work despite being only freshmen. btw- a friend of son’s who was also gifted and a grade ahead got a 5 on the AP US History exam before taking either the regular or AP version (our HS allowed students to take reg/AP or just AP without reg) offered to sophomores. He knew the material and it would have been a shame for him to be bored with either class. Children (students) move at different paces. Frankly, once you acquire basic skills most classes just add to knowledge and not how to learn it. one size does not fit all.
While I do think a 93 avg may be quite high to be allowed to take an AP ( I personally believe that B students should be allowed as well) I do think there needs to be some limitations on APs. I’m not saying that kids should be banned but I do think that a teachers recommendation of whether or not that student should take that class should take precedence.
Allow me to elaborate. In my school to take an AP you basically need your teacher to sign off on it and say “this child will do well in this class”. In most cases as long as you held a C in the class teachers would sign (the more stricter teachers would only sign if you had a B or higher). But let’s say a teacher wouldn’t sign off on an AP class and the child still wanted to do it. The parent would simply fill out an override form and the child would be put in that AP. The only issue is that if a parent does this a child MUST stay in the class for a full quarter even if they preform poorly because you acknowledge that you’ve been advised against this etc etc. In most cases the students who had there parents overide the teacher recommendation basically flunked out of that AP and switched out as soon as the first quarter ended. I personally don’t think this should be allowed because it harms the kid so much. My own friend who had there parent override a class not only had to switch to a different class and make up an entire quarter but had to deal with what that F did to their GPA. APs should be taken if a child can handle it, but if they can’t there’s no shame. Forcing a child to do an AP will do much more harm than good.
I felt my son was well-served by his high school, which allowed students to take AP classes early and without a prerequisite class. If they hadn’t done that, I don’t know what we would have done.
He was able to take the 3 main science APs in 9th, 10th, and 11th and then dual enrollment science/CS classes. (He took the AP CS test in 8th.) They let him test out of Precalc and take AP Calc BC in 10th and dual enrollment math after that.
He did have to wait until 11th and 12th grade for the AP English classes, and the history/econ/gov’t classes were size-limited so that only certain grades had priority. Honestly, the APUSH and English classes were watered down so that more people could take them. He found by reading the grading rubrics in a prep book that they were teaching essay styles aimed at getting a 3. So we probably have a lot of students getting As and 3s or 4s.
His only B+s were in 10th grade honors English from a teacher who…well never mind that rant. Anyway, the point of that is that you can’t really predict “A in regular vs B in AP” because he got much better grades in AP English.
Re# 32. NVM I give up
D2 was on the IB track in high school. She was a humanities student with intention of major in philosophy or government. When it came to choose classes junior and senior year in high school, her private college counselor advised her to take low level math and physics even though she was placed into high level math. He said aside from the fact it was better for her to get As in those low level courses than getting Bs, he was concerned that she would spend so much time on math/science that it would impact her humanities grades. As it turned out, she never took another math or physics class once she go to college.
Some of the AP courses in question cover the material in the college frosh level courses that are commonly considered to be easier ones at many colleges, and high school AP courses often take a whole year to cover what the college course covers in a semester.
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2016/Program-Summary-Report-2016.pdf indicates that a little fewer than a third of 12th graders took AP exams in 2016. Similar numbers of 11th graders took AP exams, but slightly fewer exams per student, and differently distributed (e.g. compare English language versus English literature numbers). About half as many 10th graders took AP exams (and fewer per student), and relatively few 9th graders took AP exams (mostly human geography).
Not sure how this claim necessarily follows from https://apir.wisc.edu/admissions/AP_Analysis_2015_v2.pdf (starting at page 8). For students taking Math 222 after AP calculus AB versus Math 221, those with AP 4 did insignificantly worse, but those with AP 5 did significantly better, compared to those who took Math 221. For students taking Math 234 after AP calculus BC versus Math 222, the results were similar.
In our district, many students take the APs because of the weighting they get for the classes which helps their class ranking. Although the grades for the class are reported on their transcript as unweighted. The weighting comes into play only for the calculation for their class ranking.
We attended an admissions session at Bucknell and this exact question was posed to the AO’s. Their response was we want to see you get an “A” in the AP. High rigor of schedule with a high grade.