Looking for some advice regarding which AP exams to register for. My daughter is committed to Michigan, LSA, most likely majoring in something in the Chemistry or Biology dept with an interest in a health related career. She is also considering engineering- either transferring or a dual degree with the College of Engineering. So, basically very much undecided at this point.
She currently has only taken the AP Chem exam and has 5 credits for that. She will take the AP Calc AB exam this spring and we are deciding on the others. She is taking AP Physics Mechanics but does not want to take the exam as she doesn’t feel prepared. (Unfortunatley, it’s been a bad year for AP Physics at our school. New teacher who left mid year and a class very behind where they should be.) Her other options are AP Micro and AP US Gov but I don’t see much point as they don’t relate to anything she actually wants to study. If I’m understanding correctly, they would just earn her general LSA credit, but can’t be used for distribution requirements. Is this correct? I guess I’m just not understanding the benefit. Am I missing something?
@taylor9875 Yeah there is really no benefit for getting AP Credit in classes like Econ, US Gov, English, History, etc. But Chemistry and Calc will definitely be useful for her
If the credits are not useful for graduation requirement, you should save the money. Having extea AP credits may make you to pay upperclassmen tuition rate earlier. AP econ is one of the worse for credit purpose at UMich. APUSH, Eng, World language may still be useful to fill some LSA credit requirement and for placement. You still have a chance to drop any useless AP credit by the end of the first semester if you want to avoid earlier upperclassmen rate.
My S dual-enrolled in Micro- & Macro-Econ classes at a local Univ, then also took both AP tests (just to be sure, in case he couldn’t transfer his dual-enrolled credits). Perfect scores in both cases.
UMich gave him 2 options in regards to using the above to satisfy his “Social Studies” area distribution:
(a) 6 credits, if using dual-enrolled credits, or
(b) 4 credits, if using his AP test scores (albeit getting 5’s on both tests).
He chose (a), and did the same for all/most of his dual-enrolled courses and AP tests. This resulted in him having to pay upperclassman tuition rate his first semester of freshman yr. On the bright side, this took care of a lot of pre-requisites for his dual-degree (LSA & CoE), allowing him more time to spend on taking other interesting courses, and still be able to graduate in 4 yrs comfortably.
^ For the option (b) above, one would only get half credit of the two economic courses (2 credits each for Econ101 and Econ102). In order to receive full credit for either of the two courses, one would need to retake the course. That’s why I said it is one of the worse AP for credits at UMich. For CoE students, having 13 credits in non-engineering require courses is more than enough as 3 of the 16 IB/LSA/humanities credits need to be at 300 level which cannot be fulfilled by AP credits.
I see what you meant 
However, getting 4cr (or 2cr each) is better than nothing, unless the student has better or higher-credit alternatives applicable to the area distribution requirements.
I guess what I’m saying is that if one is considering a dual-degree, it may not be a bad idea to get as many “required” credits in early on, because the cost of staying extra semester(s) is a lot higher than cost of AP tests. But yeah, I agree that excess credits are not necessary