Background I’m a rising a junior and so far and for the foreseeable future of my high school schedule won’t be the most rigorous. For instance, I’m on a track to take regular physics(AP not offered) by senior year and pre-calculus(AP Calc AB offered) will this harm my chances when applying to college? The reasons why I didn’t have a rigorous course I didn’t do well in 8th grade, so I was never able to take the Algebra Regents slowing down the chances of a more advanced math track and I didn’t do well in the first semester of Living Environment, Biology, so I had to take Earth Science instead of Chemistry.
If you have good grades then you should be fine for very good universities.
The very tippy top schools (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) are probably not going to happen. There are however hundreds of very good universities where you will do fine.
I suspect many (most?) college students don’t have A/P or Honors classes at all, except for those at colleges that like to consider themselves selective. Rigor is only important if you intend to apply to those types of colleges. I’m not sure how lack of rigor could impact merit aid, given the grades are there, but that wasn’t the OP’s question.
There are 3000+ schools in the USA…there are definitely colleges for you!
You can go to your public library and borrow the fiske guide, Princeton Review’s best colleges, and/or Insider’s guide to the colleges.
No matter what make sure you have:
- 4 years of English and social science/history (including some honors and/or AP)
- math through precalculus
- foreign language through level 3 (or 4)
- living environment, chemistry or equivalent, and if you can physics. If not, physical science and APES will do.
- preferably an art/music class
- some electives
Optimally you’d have 20 academic classes over all of high school and 24+ overall.
Sorry for not responding, but my school doesn’t offer APES just AP Bio(the only AP offered at my school) and I’ll be taking physics senior year also honor classes aren’t offered at my school.
If honors and AP are not offered, then that is actually to your advantage - you won’t be punished for not taking classes that were not available in your school.
As others have already said, you won’t be getting into Harvard or Yale, or the other most selective colleges, but attending them wouldn’t be to your advantage anyway, because you would be out of your league. If you do well in the classes you’ve taken, you will get into college - hopefully you will find one that you like, and that provides the level of rigor that is appropriate to you.
You can try to increase rigor by taking a community college class (environmental science but it could also be English composition,. Philosophy, any sort of history…) Those are considered very rigorous since they’re college classes taught at a college pace.