He said the load in college went up 60% including extra curriculars at both school and college. The school load just gets you in the flow for what could happen at college.
He must have been incredibly busy!
He just graduated. The load is by choice. You can also coast if you choose to. People take what they can reasonably manage. The college load was reasonably callibrated. No more than two hard courses a semester. That is what he wanted to do both academically and extracurricularly in college to feel like he used the opportunity appropriately. I didnât care as long he was getting his sleep.
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@DroidsLookingFor found the heart of this. You can be motivated to take a million APs by the desire to have the most APs possible. You can get As because you are motivated to be the valedictorian or because you are a perfectionist or because you have tiger parents who will make your life miserable if you donât get As or because your parents will pay you for every A. Those are all motivations, and many will be effective for many kids.
A kid who takes 12 APs and gets 5s on all of them is signaling something. It may be that they are a grade grubber with the smarts to pull it off. Or it could be that they are a passionate curious learner who is good at taking tests. Both likely have the chops to do well in a selective college. The latter is more likely to embrace the education but if the former can find a passion, - they will too. The former will be less likely to take risks as the success is the motivator whereas the latter isnât limited by the outcome. That is a difference, and a meaningful one to an educational institution. Probably not a meaningful difference to many employers in many industries who need smart, hard-workers.
Burn out will happen with the ones who arenât intrinsically motivated if the extrinsic motivators - grades, prizes, salary, status, etc. - arenât enough. When that happens varies, but at some point, the journey is more important than the destination. This may be one of the reasons that we are seeing a younger generation of workers who are committed to work/life balance.
The question of applicants is not "are they motivated " but âwhat motivates themâ. This is where recs and essays and even ECs come in.
While people complain about the lack of transparency in admissions, the reality is that we all know much better than we did decades ago what a successful applicant to a top school looks like, at least in a box-checking way. But where it used to be that (outside of the elite prep feeder schools), only kids who were the âreal dealâ managed to check the boxes - unintentionally - we all have the opportunity to make ourselves appear to have those desirable traits, and ârigorâ is one of them. When we hear CCs and AOs talk about being challenged and seeking rigor, itâs easy to see how piling up APs is an easy box to check. And when, as many posters have mentioned, this is the only option for getting good teachers and/or being with college-bound classmates, itâs a no-brainer.
For many kids, though, this is highly inappropriate or stressful. I applaud the CB for suggesting that students be intentional about where they put their efforts and I support schools that have a system to help them do that. More is not always better.
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This is an aside, and I have no opinion on this, but I found it interesting that Trevor Packer seemed to agree with the complaints on twitter about APUSH being too much to cover in a single year:
I really agree. At last yearâs AP Reading, we proposed providing 3 versions of the APUSH exam, schools could use whichever version(s) they wanted: 1491-1865; 1848-present, for 1 semester of college credit; and current version for 2 semesters of college credit. Thoughts?
https://twitter.com/AP_Trevor/status/1672333975849771013 (posted yesterday, along with the APUSH score distribution for this year: 5: 11%; 4: 15%; 3: 22%; 2: 23%; 1: 29%)
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It is good preparation for both law school and medical school 
Tons of meaningless memorization.
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(Slight clarification, the bar exam is memorization. However, law school is not⊠some things had to be memorized for finals, but not exactly as a main activity.)
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Good to know. Thanks for the correction.
Thank you for saying far more clearly and eloquently what I was trying to say.
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My S24âs medium size public, not-a-known-feeder Midwest HS does not even offer as many APs as the other HSs in the district. The impression I got from his counselor was that needed to take as many APs as possible to be considered âhighest rigor.â However, they all take government and Econ in 9th grade, and that is where they had the choice of taking AP Gov and AP micro or macro instead of the regular sections. We were uncomfortable with those APs for a kid starting HS fall 2020 with virtual and then hybrid learning.
I went to a HS that only offered 2 AP courses (which I took). My wife went to Andover where they had no APs (obviously didnât need them). Our preconception was that APs are supposed to be equivalent to college level work, so how would that be appropriate to start out S24âs HS career (and transcript!) in the first full school year of the COVID pandemic where most schools were having to âmake it upâ and adjust on the fly? He could take AP Gov now but doesnât really want to be with 9th graders since most donât take it later.
I am curious as to how adcoms will look at the Class of 24 kids who had to start 9th grade that way. Clearly though, looking at the Chance Me profiles on this site, many kids werenât slowed down at all from taking APs from 9th grade. Tends to be kids who appear to be from more well resourced schools though.
All this to say, if the College Board is making this statement, and if the original intent of AP was to simulate college level work, then AP should make restrictions on how its curriculum can be offered - not allowing it to be used for courses that are majority 9-10th graders, not allowing 9-10th graders to take AP exams at all unless they are truly on an exceptional track (skipped a grade, projected to graduate at least a full year early, etc.) and discouraging both colleges and HSs from rewarding huge numbers of APs.
Unless all that happens, nothing will change because the whole system has evolved that way, such that AP has replaced upperclass âHonorsâ courses in probably the vast majority of public HSs. These kids will still have to take all the APs to be most competitive.
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There are multiple sides to this. I doubt College Board wants to get into holding kids back or being an arbiter of who can access these courses; that would be contrary to the purpose of making advanced work available to high school students who are capable of that. For APs typically taken in 9th-10th, perhaps they are not rigorous enough to qualify as college-level courses, and that would be on College Board (adding, the question of what is a college level course is another can of worms).
I can see why comparison to classmates has value for AOs, especially in a test optional situation, though admissions consideration of transcript rigor, rank/decile/quartile by weighted GPA, and the Common App counselor form âmost demandingâ check boxes do fuel a race for greater numbers of APs.
Perhaps College Board itself simply offers too many different AP courses. Thereâs no chance CB would consider limiting its product range, ceding that potential market to DEâŠ
I agree that parents are a big factor in piling on the APs, as well as private college counselors. Our public high school is highly competitive in metro NYC, with 200 students per guidance counselor. Many families hire private counselors. They speak authoritatively about what AOs want, which is max number of APs possible.
Some of them advocate calculus for students who clearly want humanities majors, even for those who did not take Algebra in middle school. They are told to take pre-Calc over the summer so that they can take AP Calc AB their senior year. This is not for Ivies and the like but for SUNY Bing, Wisconsin, Maryland, Villanova, W&M, GW, American, etc. One counselor told S24âs friend that AB Calc is the minimum required for the Boston schools (BU, BC, Tufts and Northeastern).
They like to scare parents by insisting that admissions are getting harder every year. Iâm inclined to think that great grades, and good recs/essays/ECs are required, but not Calc for a government or psych major. Wouldnât the students be better off having a summer job or EC, rather than head to summer school after the high rigor and stress of junior year?
Edited to add that these are kids who took AP Euro, APUSH, AP Lang Comp, AP Lit, AP Physics 1, and AP whatever world language.
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Here at CC, we have so much discussion of what AOs want. I wish there were more AOs around that could more accurately answer this question, even anonymously. Sure, the evaluation is holistic. But, I think it would be helpful to have a glimpse into how AOs actually think about this factor, and whether different colleges evaluate this differently. For example, there are probably some top schools where some number of APs in the core subjects is sufficient, but are there colleges that really do want to see a student maxing out on APs, and how much might that depend on the balance of the app, vs being table stakes, etc.
As per TOS clause 4, they cannot remain anonymous and claim to be AOs.
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There was a book published about a year ago by a journalists who was allowed to sit in the review process for a few (well known) schools and went into it in great detail.
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That seems crazy. Many kids from our HS in MA go to NEU,GW, BU who donât take AP calc.
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Jeff Selingo. Who gets in and why.
Published in 2020 based on 2018-19 admissions cycle. Itâs a very good book, but a lot changed after 2020 (increased test blind/test optional schools and much more emphasis on diversity at the top schools). So keep that in mind.
Note the following:
- âCollege levelâ material may be relatively basic in the case of courses that do not have prerequisites, such as introductory economics, psychology, (human) geography, CS (principles). So it is not out of the realm of possibility that a high school student could handle such material (even in 9th or 10th grade).
- Many high school AP courses cover what is typically a semester of material in college over a year in high school. High school is also more supervised than college in terms of keeping students from falling behind.
Due to the second point above, it is entirely possible that many high school students can handle some types of (introductory level) college level material taught at high school pacing (i.e. AP courses) But perhaps that may not be a truly âcollege levelâ course considering the slower pacing and other ways that college and high school differ.
Yet here on these forums, being on the +1 math track is seen as being âbehindââŠ
Our HS only offers +1 yet we send kids to the Ivy League and other top schools every year. Most HS in MA are similar in terms of AP Calculus being the top level of math available, but students from our HSâs seem to do extremely well in college admission. There is some weird math arms race going out there among certain students.
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