AP Credits

Can someone please explain AP credits.

can AP credits be used for LEE (liberal education elective)? will world history AP credit work for LEE elective? what other most common AP exams can be used for LEE electives? what about AP Spanish?

Also can someone explain what are free electives? can AP computer science credit be used for one of the free elective class? because in the AP placement information page, AP computer science credit does now allow skipping any computer science class.

I already reviewed website for AP credits and still not clear to me.

@illinoisx3 and @literallymarx - do you have any input regarding AP credits.

I don’t have specifics, sorry, but I’d hope an admissions counselor or a counselor in the department could provide a chart or something. By Illinois law, specific scores correlate to specific classes and credits. Not all of them may be relevant to your major, of course. My son had 4 semesters worth of AP/college credits coming in, but many were not applicable to his engineering degree. So, he added an LAS math major to take advantage of them efficiently and will still graduate in 4 years with dual degrees.

Yes AP credits can get you out of your gen eds (thats what I assume you mean by LEEs?). AP Spanish is nice because a good score can get you out of the language requirement, at least for college of engineering which only needs 3 years instead of 4.

A 3 or 4 on the World History AP gives you a generic history credit that’s only good as a free elective. (aka any of the credit that doesn’t have a class number with it)

A 5 gives you credit for a specific class, HIST100, which actually fufills 2 gen ed requirements. https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2019/fall/HIST/100

Free electives are just “empty classes.” Aka you need ~128 hours to graduate, but required classes only make up say 120 of those hours. So that 8 hour discrepancy can be made up with literally any class. A lot of LAS majors (Economics is pretty well known for this) have a huge amount of free electives.

APCS gives you 3 hours of credit in the non-major CS classes (either 105 or 101). I don’t think you can use that credit as free elective credit if you’re a CS major, but don’t quote me on that. Otherwise it likely fulfills a requirement for your major or can be used as free elective.

See this: https://admissions.illinois.edu/apply/freshman/college-credit-ap