<p>I know it's a little early to be thinking about this stuff, but I was going over a brochure that I got from Vanderbilt's biomedical engineering program and I saw something interesting. Basically, it said that a lot of medical schools don't recognize AP credits when looking at what classes you took as an undergraduate (i.e making sure you have all the necessary pre-recs), so if you use them to get out of, say, chemistry, you end up having to take just as much chemistry as you would without any AP credits. I was surprised because this was the first mention of anything like that. Do any of you have any insight or experience in dealing with this issue?</p>
<p>It’s true for 98% of med schools. They know AP classes aren’t up to the rigor of college courses. They won’t let you get away with just bypassing the med school prereq’s, especially when there are basically only 4 in the first place (gen chem, orgo, physics, and bio).</p>
<p>Thanks for the input norcalguy. Did you experience this personally or have you just heard about it?</p>
<p>I experienced this personally. In high school, I was one of the best, if not the best, AP chemistry student in my class, 5 on the exam, all that. The course barely covered 2/3 of what we did in college. It would’ve been real GPA and learning carnage if I’d skipped out on Gen Chem when I got to college.</p>
<p>in my high school we had to pay for the AP tests, about $90, so because i knew that it wouldn’t suffice for med school admissions, i just decided against taking the AP test and took the intro level courses in college and probably had a much better understanding of the material after seeing it 2x and going more in depth in college.</p>
<p>You can use AP credits though if you take upper-level courses instead, and AP calc can be useful because med schools are more lenient with that credit as long as you take at least a term of calc/math (or so I hear). I used my AP bio credit to skip the first intro course and managed to get a couple terms ahead in bio because of it. I’m a bio major though so I take a lot of upper-level biology courses and labs. Did I miss some information? Probably. Did it set me behind in other courses? Not that I have come across thus far.</p>