From what I’ve seen, the quantity of the material in non-STEM AP classes is what makes them difficult (stresses time management, organization, etc.). In STEM AP classes the material itself is far more difficult.
11th graders, yes. APUSH and AP English Language are common courses for 11th graders, and have been for decades.
10th graders (and 9th graders!!!), while there are the exceptions, I would say no. More to the point, so would many colleges, which is why many top colleges don’r give credit for exams like Human Geography and World History, that are commonly taken by underclassmen.
I think the question of if STEM APs or humanities APs are harder depends largely on the aptitude of the student as well as the rigor of the teacher.
@gwnorth – my D18 is taking AP Calc AB right now (junior in HS). Her textbook is almost identical to the Calculus book from my first year of EE at UT-Austin back in the Stone Age. She’s only covering the first half or so of the book this year while I believe we covered the entire book in my first year of EE. Also, I imagine that the tests and grading are less rigorous than college.
I’m not thrilled with this but I lost the anti-rigor jihad a long time ago. I don’t think D18 got enough experience with the fundamentals in the accelerated math track. At this level, she should be able to look at a problem and instantly know what needs to be done to solve it. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t.
AP Classes are set at the level of average colleges not the Ivy League. So they aren’t necessarily super duper difficult.
Some schools don’t offer a lot of APs because they have other ways of offering advanced course work, like agreements with local community colleges. In our school Calc BC is a one year course and it moves along at a normal college pace. Calc AB only covers one semester.
My younger kid got a 5 on AP World as a 10th grader. I was astounded. He’s a smart kid, but he was not writing like a college student IMO. He’s like me though, we do the opposite of panicking on exams and often do better than our teachers expect.
Start a list of contemplated colleges and what APs they accept and how many credits they offer. It’s helpful to know that all. Having AP credits is allowing both our college kids to pick up a minor that they want at no extra cost or time.
And AP Music Therory is hard. that’s all i can say.
@bgbg4us that’s good advice, I’d also add to check to make sure your prospective schools don’t have limits on the number of AP credits they accept.
My DD ran into this, her university stated that they accepted an unlimited amount of AP credit but her program (meteorology) will only 32 credits to me used toward her degree. They will allow 64 DE credits or a combination of AP and DE with a max of 32 AP credits. Once we realized this she took several classes DE classes her senior year instead of the AP classes she had planned to take.
At my son’s HS, the 2-year APUSH is far more challenging than the other AP classes, including stem ones, primarily because of the teacher quality, workload assigned and the challenge level of the grading. APUSH is where “no A’s are given”, and few kids take it as a result. So I think it can be relative.
AP courses are a wonderful thing to get HS’s to teach a more advanced course than they may otherwise offer. The courses offer a known quantity. They are average college type courses, not those of good flagships or other top tier schools. They can be well or poorly taught- the reason to have the standardized AP exams.
I would never choose a college for the number of AP credits they allow. Instead I would choose the appropriate academic school and be pleased if AP credits are given. btw- UW-Madison does allow AP credits but calculus students also get credit for the Honors sequence and many other students repeat first semester regular calculus because they are not well prepared for the next semester- UW’s course have much more than the AP versions. Similar to taking local community college courses- they won’t have the same material as a better four year school. Likewise taking breadth courses at an average college then transferring means giving up the version from the higher tiered school. Etc.
@droppedit, the reason I ask about the rigour is that we live in Canada and AP while relatively new, is becoming more and more common. I don’t want to derail this thread so I’ll start a new one.
“The most selective colleges want to see that you chose the most rigorous courses available to you.”
I’ve seen this statement in various forms many times. DD’s high school offers every single AP course. Are the colleges then expecting kids to double up in science and/or math? Or, is one math class and one science class per year sufficient even if the student only takes one or two AP classes in math and one or two in science?
@tutumom2001: colleges have reasonable expectations. “The most challenging schedule” doesn’t mean “all Ap’s the school offers”. “Most demanding” doesn’t mean “Most demanding imaginable”, but rather “able to handle the academics required at a top college”. Check with the GC (some can lose all perspective at some top schools), but a student with 6-8 Ap’s will be fine if otherwise engaged in class and pursuing a talent at the highest level (could be rowing, slam, the oboe, etc., it doesn’t matter as long as the student’s really, really good or really unique.)
The exact AP’s matter, too: typically, having one each of AP English, AP Math, AP Science, AP Foreign Language, AP Social Science is seen as good, and one from AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Physics is seen as better than APES, or AP History (any flavor)/AP Econ/AP Gov is seen as better than AP Human Geography. But there’s no requisite, exact number, and no specific list. A student interested in the STEM who has AP Chem and AP Physics 1+C plus AP Calc BC but no AP Foreign Language and AP English may be as okay as a future Philosophy major who has both AP English classes, AP Foreign language, and several AP Social Science classes. It’s a whole “package”.
BUT IT DOES NOT MEAN YOUR CHILD SHOULD TAKE ALL AP’s available. A student with A’s in 8 “non lite” AP’s can do the work anywhere. As Stanford put it “it’s not a game of who has the most AP’s, wins”. After 8, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and you should be wary of taking an Ap for taking an AP.
You cannot take all AP’s available at our school. Schedule does not allow for 5 years of four foreign languages!
Our school offers 22 APs. Generally speaking one math and one science per year is fine. In our high school, it’s standard for advanced students to take high school bio in 8th grade. That way they can take AP science courses junior and senior year easily. Some take more. Students used to take AP Physics B as sophomores, I’m not sure what they are doing now that they’ve stretched that course into a 2 year sequence. It really depends on interest - my oldest took HS Chem one summer so he took AP Bio, AP Chem and AP Physics C. He also took AP Comp Sci as a freshman. Younger son who was not science oriented too AP Physics C and AP Bio, and all three AP History courses. Younger son took AP Calc BC as a senior. Older son took it as a junior as he accelerated in math while in middle school.
Older son ended up with about 8 APs and younger one with 6 or 7.
@MYOS1634 Thank you! If she goes by the one-class-per-year rate, she’ll end up with about 8 total in her core subjects.
My kids HS allowed four AP’s senior year and 2 junior year. That was the most rigorous schedule.
The “regular” classes were plenty rigorous, you were not allowed to take an AP class and skip the test (quality control, and to discourage kids who wanted to pad their transcripts for college admissions without having to take the test).
Dozens of kids every year get into the elites/top colleges in the country. Kids either took AB Calc or BC, not both (as in some HS’s); there was no grade inflation, and adcom’s understood that the reason kids didn’t have 12 AP’s on their transcript is that it wasn’t possible. (School offered them, but clearly a kid taking AP Euro isn’t taking AP US History since they meet at the exact same time).
Work with what your HS has. No kid needs 12 AP’s to be a credible candidate for college unless the regular curriculum is so weak that this is the only way to actually get an education.
The honors social studies sequence at our school is:
9- APHUG
10- APEURO
11- APUSH
12 - AP Gov/Micro/Macro (most pick 2)
There are no other honors social studies classes offered
^ in that case, it’d be on the school profile and it’d be okay .