Right, which is why I’m qualifying my positions. And sure, fine.
@skieurope Yeah obviously those schools are impressed by people who have won some major award or achieved something spectacular during the early years of their life. To bad that happens to an infinitesimally small fraction of a percent of students.
And to go back on the topic, “Will colleges be impressed?” Yes, they absolutely will be. In the case of competitive high schools, in order to be a top student and to achieve among the top of your high school that means stacking your course load with AP classes.
Being an attractive applicant to top colleges, without an amazing hook or story, means being at the top.
Adcoms are NOT impressed with a lot of AP’s. In fact they actively dislike “AP junkies”, kids who apply the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to AP’s rather than constructing a schedule that makes sense. One needs to “understand” your schedule. What does it signal? What do we learn about you through your choice of courses?
If you took all the AP classes on offer, we learn that you’re a hard worker but that you probably suffer from significant hubris due to such a schedule OR lacked sleep (red flag). If you are “well lopsided” you must have pursued one subject through every possible opportunity (summer camp, CC classes…?) If you are intellectually curious, you must have “unexpected” course choices and EC’s. tAP’s in themselves are just one piece of the puzzle and “lots of AP’s” doesn’t add anything.
Finally, adcoms see literally HUNDREDS of such schedules. There’s always someone who thinks taking lots of APs will “impress” adcoms. Adcoms aren’t impressed by the number of Ap’s. As Skieurope stated, they’re impressed with something extraordinary. Taking tons of AP’s doesn’t qualify. What impresses your high school classmates won’t “impress” adcoms If you meet the test for “able to do the work” and “challenged himself/herself and meets our expectations”, they move on to the rest of your application. You need to have a certain academic profile. Once you’ve met that threshold, you’re good. (The excessive nature of your schedule will either not get any bonus because as long as you have 6-8 you’re good, or get a ?/- because it looks insane ; someone may check whether your HS did away with honors classes and whether your choice was either AP or regular, in which case you won’t get dinged and instead will be assumed to have taken the requisite number of honors/APs.) There won’t be a second review of how many Ap’s you’ve taken, “X took 7, Z took 9, Q took 13, let’s take Q”. Afte the first cut and the double reads, the discussion will be about kids who stick in adcoms’ memories, who’ll discuss them and want to “defend them” to their colleagues.
UNhooked students think they control something when they take more and more AP’s. But it’s an illusion. If the university has less than 20% acceptance, it’s a lottery that’ll likely depend on soft factors.
How to be a High School Superstar and The Gatekeepers should be mandatory reading 
- alongside Colleges that Change lives. 
Ask your GC whether you’d qualify for “mos rigorous” with 10 AP’s/what about with 8?/What about with 6?
… typically 6-8 AP’s or equivalent + Honors (where together all equal ~20 or 4X5 in the summary card) will get you the “most rigorous” check mark. Some GC’s specify what AP’s those should be, and those typically include AP English Language + some from the list of subjects below. Some GC’s
Top colleges want to see 5 classes per year at either Honors or AP level (and on the little summary card those are summarized as: 3, 4, 5, 6+ for each year, with the total hopefully 20-22 at the end); 4 years each of Science, Social Science/History, and English, plus Math up to Precalculus Honors or Calculus, and Foreign Language level 4 or AP; science should include bio, chem, physics (at any level) + one more, preferably AP Bio, chem, or physics for students aiming at a STEM major (Calc BC and Physics C, if offered, are especially appreciated for future engineering students but overall the annotation is “calculus”/check, period.) Plus one “personal pick” if available, especially senior year. Senior year also allows for some flexibility compared to the other years, allowing for doubling up in a subject or taking a “fun” class just for learning’s sake even if it doesnt count for graduation requirements. Dual Enrollment is viewed as favorably (or even more favorably) as an AP class because the pace is faster than AP and the level of autonomy/maturity required is much higher.
If you’re top 10% at a high performing high school, your exact rank doesn’t matter. The colleges will recalculate your GPA anyway. You actual rank only matters if you’re applying from a low-performing school, where you should be a clear standout.
Do you really think that is true? Genuinely asking not challenging. So if you are #29 out of 300 at a middle/upper middle income public high school,you will be treated the same as #2 or #6? In a school where the bottom half ends up in community college and only the top 30% even apply beyond local schools and that is #200 in a state like California, however there is a robust AP program for those that want it and some 40 kids will take AP science in every grade? They usually get two HYPM a year.
Or the converse, you are #6, estimated, at a small, good but without the connections or prestige of a Horace Mann, a private that does not rank and only graduates 30 a year? Where half the class wants to go to a top school or get merit somewhere and the other half just cares about going to prom. It is good enough to be #6 or is it only #1-3 that are considered top.
@SeekingPam, @MYOS1634 is as right as a person can be given the vagaries of the admissions process and the range of possibilities. I have watched #1,2,3 in a class not get a HYPSM/etc and a #8,10,12 get in. Also, most of the current HYP/etc students that I know were also turned down by another one (or more) of those colleges.
The thing about the super-selective colleges is- wait for it- their AdComs actually have some idea what they are doing. They read thousands of applications, looking for the applications that stand out, and they are surprisingly good at pulling the kids that are going to work well at their university.
When you listen to any adcom people (and I have listened to many dozens, both on and off the record, as a parent and as a friend) when they talk about what makes an applicant stand out it is NEVER ‘oh, let’s take this one was #2 instead of that one who was #6’.
I know that it’s true.
It’s really not simple. 
For students attending such schools tha 16 APs can even be planned, being top 10% is all it takes. Top 20% or top 25% remains quite honorable although not probably sufficient for the “reach for everyone” schools (but there are exceptions).
Obviously, I’m not speaking about automatic admission - like the “local context” pathway for California residents, or he Top 7% rule at UT.
And obviously a student ranked 29/300 will not be considered the same as a student ranked 80/300. But 13 vs. 25? doesn’t even enter the conversation.
Note that a school where half the students attend a community college (except perhaps in CA) is not considered “high performing”. It’s considered “typical”. A “high performing” school isn’t qualified thus because it gets a couple students into tippy-top schools, but rather because most students aim for 4-year colleges and receive an education that prepares them for it. % of students in difficult life circumstances (free/reduced lunch, homeless, ELL) also matters - even if a handful make it to top school through Questbridge or Posse it doesn’t make the school high-performing.
If you rank #29/300 at a school where almost everybody goes to college and 70+% attend a 4-year college, yes there’s no difference between 29, 13, or 2. All of these students in the top 10% meet basic academic thresholds (after verification of course, but they typically have both excellent grades and course rigor) and move to the second level of selection (they can do the work - what can they bring our university? are they memorable in some way?)
If your private school doesn’t rank, it’ll indicateon the School Profile what % of the class reached 3.75+, 3.5, etc and what % will attend a 4-year college or a 2-year college. If you are in a college prep school with a small class size, numbers aren’t as meaningful, but it’d be assumed students ranked 1-10 would have received an excellent education, while students ranked 11-15 would still be quite above average compared to a typical public high school. For the students ranked 20-30, they’d still not be considered equivalent to “bottom of the class” at a public comprehensive high school since they’re bottom of a college prep class.
An example of a “low performing” school is a school where only a small minority attend a 4-year college, where the #1 post graduation plans are the military or work, where there’s a drop out problem, where the average ACT is 15-18, where the average SAT CR+M is in the mid 600’s to high 700s, and where perhaps 10% students take even one AP class. There, a student would really need to rank very high for both results (straight A’s) and curriculum rigor (whatever is most rigorous + try to take DE classes if not enough is offered at the school or try to supplement his/her curriculum). Top 10% wouldn’t cut it there because it’d cover such a vast expanse of achievement (possibly from ACT 21 to ACT 27, for example!)
I think what people are trying to tell you here is that it should be possible to infer something about your interests by looking at your high school schedule, which we can’t. If you think you’d like to be a surgeon, why are you loading up on every social science AP? Where is Physics 2 or, better, Physics C? I suppose AP Environmental in addition to AP Bio might make sense if you are expecting to be a bio major, but why both AP world and AP Euro? That’s a bit redundant unless maybe you wanted to major in history. At the very least skip AP Euro or some of the other social sciences and take physics.
I think it’s a bad idea to skip precalculus. You say this is a new option this year, so your school has zero experience in how this will work out for the students. Do you want to be a guinea pig? If it doesn’t work out, your school will change their mind but you’ll be the one with the C and the 3 on your record.
Doesn’t your high school have required courses like PE, health etc? What happened to those?
Contrary to many posters, I don’t think there is any one size fits all number of AP classes to take. Obviously many schools offer few or limit numbers of APs, so students can’t take more. Why do you think that some tippy top schools are limiting them? I think it’s because they know their students are better off doing other things than taking every single AP out there. But, there are also schools like ours which has no honors program for upperclassmen. Honors students take APs in their core subjects which gives a minimum (now that honors physics has also been eliminated in favor of AP physics 1) of 8 APs, 9 if they take foreign language every year. And that isn’t counting any extra APs they take as electives. We don’t know what kind of school the OP attends. But I would urge you to think about what you’re actually interested in and not just load up every single AP class possible.
One last point. Freshman classes, in our school at least, are a lot easier than the higher level classes. I’d be careful about getting in over your head. AP world and AP bio are both a lot of work. Adding calc with no precalc seems to me likely to be a bad idea. When are you going to learn the precalc material? Is this going to be self-study?
@MYOS1634 I looked up more stats about the 29/300 school. The average ACT is a 28 and average SAT was a 1760 so I guess I underestimated them (seems high for an average ACT!) about 70% go to 4 year colleges and 27% to 2 year and it is ranked much higher in the state than I originally thought. So #29 has the same shot at Harvard or ND as #1? It does seem at this school that only 1-6 really ever end up accepted at Harvard and it could be any of them. However all the top kids do well in admissions, sometimes not always as well or where they would like.
As for the private school, it is a college prep of sorts. It seems like the bottom and middle of the class do better than the very top of the class. For example a student recently got into an OOS Flagship full pay who was at the very bottom of the class, had barely been able to get through 3 years of math and would normally be attending a directional, taking APs is not remotely an option for this kid (not sure what will happen in college). I know of public school kids with better stats who were not accepted at the OOS. A friend’s public school kid is going to the same college (but honors) with some merit who got a 2100 evenly broken up and turned down UMich for this school.
On the flip side for the top kids, it has been many years since anyone has gotten into HYPSM even though there have been at least 2-7 kids a year scoring in the 33-36 range. Usually 1-4 kids a year will get into an ED Ivy (either ED or off the waitlist if not ED). Other respectable schools such as Vassar, UMich/Wisc are more common. They used to put percentages as you described. A friend showed me an old profile from 5 years ago that said for the class of 200_ 3% get this average, 10% get this and so on. Friends whose kids attend now say the new profiles do not have percentages at all. You cannot even use the old profiles because the class changes so much from year to year and the teachers grade in absolutes so for example the physics teacher does not care if only 1 kid gets an A in her class, so be it. Unless your kid gets an A there is no way to determine whether he or she did well in the class relative to that teacher. In a sense it does not matter since there is only one upper level teacher in each subject so every advanced kid is mostly taking the same teacher at the same time. As opposed to public school where one AP Euro teacher can be a much harder grader than the other. I think the grade deflation and lack of percentiles may be hurting their admissions as they are definitely not doing as well as they used to. OTOH in a very smart grade (which sometimes happens at this school) an average smart kid who would have been #6 in a typical grade gets pushed back to #12 or 15 and so would his or her percentiles if they still had them.
Also, a friend whose kids go to a different, more presitigious prep school that graduates 50 say the guidance office provides the breakdown for every class. So a college knows that Mrs. Smith only gave out 1 A in Freshman English and 14 Bs or whatever. So they realize a student with a B average could be #3 in the class. Is this standard?
Is it standard? No. I can count on one hand the number of examples that I have seen where a school provides a breakdown of grades by course, and even then, it is usually only for courses taken as a junior. That said, a GC can certainly mention, if s/he chooses to do so, that Mrs. Smith gives few A’s.
As your own research shows you, @SeekingPam, it is very difficult to say what is ‘standard’ - which is one of the reasons that trying to figure out exactly where the lines are for admission is so difficult. The other reason is that most colleges don’t just look at the number metrics (though some larger, usually state, universities will do first level cuts on just numbers). Sometimes factors such as athletics, URM, legacy, etc play a role (though definitely not as certain a role as people sometimes think). More often, however, there are elements to the application that attracts the AdComm readers attention- an element that may or may not be clear to somebody who hasn’t read the whole app. Which is why a student who looks to you like a a no-hoper can end up in a competitive college.
AdComm members read as many as 50-80 apps a day, and may read 2000+ apps in a season. They simply don’t have time to parse whether Applicant A had Mrs Smith or Mr Jones for Freshman English, which is why many (most?) colleges have a system for aligning grades before the app is even read (these days, usually an algorithm for re-calculating GPAs). If a candidate is on the border and they come up for discussion in committee, then the specific classes taken or the quirks of the school may come up (usually by the regional rep, who knows the schools).
No doubt this has been said, but you are going to be as stressed as humanly possible by taking that many APs. Do you value your social life, or sleep? There is no special award for taking the most APs, and a college isn’t going to accept just because you took that many. The problem with your schedule is that it gives zero impression of who YOU are. Just from this schedule I would say you are a grade drone, and colleges are not wild about grade drones. Even HYPSM want to see what kids are into, apart from racking up APs. You could easily drop four of these APs, still have the most rigorous schedule, and slip in a “fun” class every so often. Take photography class, or art, or tech, or something that shows what your interests are apart from academics. If you are hoping to get into tippy top colleges, having 16 APs is not going to be your ticket to accpetance.
I’m a senior graduating with 16 APs (and several dual enrolled college courses) and I had a similar course track except I did more physics and no foreign language because my school didn’t offer it. I was fine with my load. I got into a rhythm of balancing all my classes. I play varsity basketball so my grades dipped a little bit during the season but I maintained As. I didn’t really read all your posts about your extracurriculars and such so just be careful to schedule your extracurriculars well so that it doesn’t become impossible to do your work. But yes, your courseload is do-able, cuz I did it
Have you talked to anyone before coming up with this schedule? Guidance counselor? Parents? Older students? Older siblings? Many young students come onto CC and present preliminary college lists and often it looks like the child took 15 schools from the first 25 schools listed in the USNWR and added their flagship state school and/or a local directional for “safeties”. Your schedule looks like the AP equivalent; you took the AP courselist at your high school and put these classes on your schedule along with Band. You need to put a little more thought than that. Maybe it’s the scheduling but something needs adjustment.
I’ll harp on the math. Take pre-calc. Take AP Stat and pre-calc next year, if you can and want but take pre-calc. That leaves your junior and senior years open for AP calc AB and BC if your school doesn’t allow you to take BC before AB. I don’t know what your interests are. If it’s in history/political science, then your schedule seems on track (but then, what with all the math?). If you think you may want to study sciences, then the schedule is a bit random.
Oddly, despite having six AP classes your junior year, it looks like the least impressive year. It may be the lack of focus or the relatively easy-ness of the AP classes.
Think about what you need to be successful in college (not necessarily what you think college admissions want to see):
Math - as I said, take pre-calc. Math isn’t a race for most students; it’s not about how far you can get through the curriculum… You need the base. Even the top students need that base - they don’t skip. They just learn, understand and internalize faster and better. If you’re a good math student, double up on stat and pre-calc.
Sciences - colleges want biology, chemistry and physics. Your proposed schedule looks like you’re trying to get away with the easiest possible AP sequence. You don’t take physics 1 until senior year. Move that up to junior year. Consider AP chem, if you think you want to study engineering or any science (you don’t have to decide now). If you think you like environmental science, take it but otherwise drop it - it’s not hard but it’s more work than one usually expects.
English looks fine.
Language looks fine.
Social Sciences - Like APES, if you find the topic interesting, take it but otherwise drop it. Again, you don’t have to make this decision as a rising sophomore.
Another suggestion - lighten up your senior year or work a study hall into your schedule. Find a “fun” class to take - theatre, art, photography. Make your junior year more challenging and your senior year a bit less challenging.
You have AP Calculus AB in sophomore year, Stats in your junior year, and then Calculus BC in your senior year. I do not like this math pathway. I feel like it would be harder to take calculus for a year, take a unrelated class, and then go back. Also, taking Calculus builds off of what you learned in lower level math classes, so it may be better to take that the year of the SAT. AP Statistics is considered a “light” AP.
My recommended pathway – AP Calculus AB (10), AP Calculus BC (11), AP Statistics (12).
Also, why do you suddenly go from Algebra 2 to Calculus? Shouldn’t you take Pre-Calculus or Trig first? You might be pretty confused going straight from Algebra 2, and I recommend taking a full-year Pre-Calculus before Calculus AB. That means AB would be junior year and BC would be in sophomore year.
In 11th grade, you have AP Environmental Science. I’m not saying it is an easy AP class, but colleges don’t view it that favorably. If you want to go into an earth science field when you’re older or study the environment, this course may be for you. Though, if your school offers it, I would advise taking AP Chemistry instead. It also wouldn’t be as challenging if you have already taken a chemistry course. If you want to go into medicine or a STEM field in the future (especially major in one), I recommend this course even more.
Sequence – GT Biology, GT Chemistry/AP Bio, AP Chemistry, AP Physics
You could do the switching around with Social Studies, but it really wouldn’t make a difference. What would make a difference is showing focus in a particular area. Getting into colleges isn’t all about “who can take the most APs.” Looking at your schedule, it is pretty unclear what you are interested in majoring in or doing as a career in the future. Try to incorporate that into your schedule (or at least your ECs).
If you have a seven-period day, you wouldn’t have room for all of those classes because an AP science takes up 2 periods due to labs. If you have an eight-period day without block scheduling, you would have no time for lunch. You would have room in your schedule if your day has 8 periods w/block scheduling or 9 periods. Gym needs to be incorporated into your schedule also.
I also am an extreme over-achiever and I think this schedule is pushing it a little. That many APs? It seems almost impossible to do well with that many at once. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself, just challenge yourself.
While this is overdoing it and the math sequence is off and so is the rigor of Junior year, I am not sure I agree with the people who say this is not focused on his future major. When did a 14 year old have to decide on what he will be doing at 40? Some perfectly bright 22 year olds have no idea. The idea of high school and even college is to explore, do you like Chem, love it? hate it? tolerate it enough to get through it for some larger goal such as med school? Maybe AP Enviro looks fun or maybe Psych does. Take it now and see if you like it (although I agree you need one of the more traditional sciences Junior year.)
There is a general curriculm that most better colleges expect to have been done between 8th-12th some form of bio, chem and physics, some form of world history and American History plus an American Government Course of some type. Econ is a bonus and 4 years of English and a few years of a foreign language. This alone takes care of at least 18 classes (AP/honors/regular). This should include, depending on your school at least one AP or IB in science, math, English and history/social studies. More than that is a bonus. At most high schools the school writer still has to take AP calculus (WHY???) and the school math geek still takes APush and AP Lit even if he cannot stand reading anything longer than the package opening directions on printer ink!
Let’s face it, there are schools that hardly offer any and so you do not have to take a ridiculous number, there are schools where EVERYONE takes APs and they will wonder if you do not. So probably older students or the college guidance office can give OP the best advice as to what is considered normal at his school.
I would like to amend this by saying that HYPSM especially want to see what kids are into, apart from racking up APs. The vast majority of kids who apply to HYPSMCB etc. are academically qualified, and many are simply stellar students. The way people stand out is by dedicating their time to something they love and that excites them. Colleges want to see who you are.