<p>I have a high chance of earning enough AP credits to skip my freshman year of college and graduate in 3 years. But lately, I've been worrying more and more that I will suffer immensely by starting a sophomore schedule my first year in college.</p>
<p>My question is, what are the similarities and differences between a college class and an AP class from high school? Are they equally difficult?</p>
<p>Depends on your school 100%. At my HS the AP classes were a joke. We literally took naps every single day and so did the teachers. I’m not even joking. No homework or tests. That was my HS…lol</p>
<p>I went to a good high school where most people who took APs got a 5 on the exam, and quite a number of people took the exams. My high school AP classes were challenging, and college classes were hardly that much more difficult than them. The big difference is that you will you be expected to do a lot more independently in college. You’ll only meet for about half the time a week, if that, and for about a third of the time less a year, but will still cover the same information in GenChem1&2 as you did in AP Chem. So you will have to study a lot more on your own.</p>
<p>What classes were you planning to place out of?</p>
<p>Hard to say. A lot of people with 5s on BC Calc retake Calc II and struggle greatly at Brown, while others jump seamlessly into honors Calc III. I’d also imagine it varies by test - BC Calc and Physics have extremely generous curves, and it’s possible to get a 5 without understanding all of the material, while Latin does not have nearly as generous a curve. It also depends on your college, though. Supposedly, a 5 on an AP exam is equivalent to an A in a college course, and I’d imagine there are college courses for which that’s true (it sounds like AP Chem is like Brown’s Gen Chem 1 course in that regard).</p>
<p>I think it depends on your high school and your college. I felt that my AP classes in high school did a great job preparing me for college level work, and I’d say that my AP classes were about as hard as my college classes have been for the most part. </p>
<p>Also, your AP classes might allow you to finish a year early, but you might not necessarily start with classes that are higher level because of your AP credits. It’s very unlikely that AP classes would completely displace an entire freshman schedule, and you’d probably still be taking a lot of Gen Eds, especially if your school or major has specific requirements that aren’t covered by AP courses. For example, you might be required to take intro to soc, cultural anthropology, or philosophy, none of which are covered by AP credits. </p>
<p>I think the main place where you can run into trouble is by placing into higher level math and science courses, which can be especially challenging. Whether that is a good or bad decision will probably depend on your school and schedule. For instance, if you get out of gen chem because of AP credits and you don’t have to take any higher level chemistry, this is probably a good thing, but if you place directly into organic chem you might struggle a bit as a freshman.</p>
<p>I agree with the other posters that with math and science you need to look at each class to determine whether you should use AP credit. My daughter did not use her AP Physics credit because her AP class was algebra based and she needed the calc based physics. However, most of her other classes filled gen ed requirements at her university. At the end of her second year of college, she has 96 credits toward graduation, so she could graduate at the end of three years. Instead, she will use her two years that she has left (on a full tuition scholarship) to complete two very different majors and a minor. I have no idea how many credits she will have by the time she graduates, but she will not be worrying about having the mimimum!</p>
<p>As a parent of a young person with a fair number of AP credits, one of the great advantages is the flexibility it gives you to explore your interests.</p>
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I know we went to the same high school, so I would say that it depends 100% on the individual teachers in your school. At my high school, the AP Statistics teacher was a moron who called me out for doing standard deviations by hand instead of with a calculator. However, I loved my AP Psychology teacher; my AP Music Theory teacher was far better than any of my friends’; though I disagreed with most of my AP English Literature teacher’s interpretations, he gave us a ton of work and gave us the means to make arguments for our own interpretations. The other AP English Literature teacher at my high school never gave homework and the discussions were a joke.</p>
<p>In general, AP English classes = joke. This is why America fails at writing.</p>
<p>AP English isn’t really a joke. (Am I feeding a ■■■■■ here?) You have to write and write well on that exam in a limited time frame to get a 4 or 5. I am glad I am skipping to Vector Calculus, skipping Composition (THANK THE LORD! You have no idea how much I struggle with focusing in English), and Calculus-Physics will be a lot easier after Physics B. </p>
<p>But College courses are a lot harder because it’s on you, and many times there are proofs and other stuff that are harder to grasp and have more depth than the AP curriculum specifies for. Depends on the high school.</p>
<p>I don’t think you’ll have to worry about starting off with a “sophomore schedule”. There should be plenty of gen-ed courses left and intro classes for your major that you’re required to take. For instance, I claimed everything that one could possibly claim with AP credit for my majors (like 18 classes or sometihng, started off classified as a “junior”) and the classes I took my first semester still had plenty of freshmen.</p>
<p>Yeah, I wouldn’t say there’s any such thing as a sophomore or freshman “schedule.” I’ll be a sophomore in fall and I’m taking a few 101 classes and I’m sure even seniors do that for electives and stuff. In college the only real thing that will be linear is your major, other than that there are many ways to a certain degree, many ways to fill requirements, etc.</p>