I’m currently a sophomore trying to plan out the classes I want to take for the rest of high school. By junior year, I will already be taking Calculus BC (the highest math offering at my school). The only math classes available for me to take would be AP Statistics or engineering math. I’m in the PLTW program, so Senior year I get to choose between having engineering math or engineering science as an elective. These both fulfill 4th year math/science requirements. I was wondering if I should take AP Chem in place of Stats and take engineering math so I have some sort of math class. AP Chem would be the one of the only things I would regret not taking in high school.
Proposed Schedule:
Symphony Orchestra
A Cappella Choir
Engineering math
AP Physics C
AP Chem /(AP Statistics)
AP English
AP Gov (1 semester)
AP Microeconomics (1 semester)
I plan on taking some math classes at the local community college over the Summer and maybe during the school year. I’d really appreciate if you gave me your input!
Hey! I also did AP Calc BC junior year, so I’m doing AP Stat senior year mostly for the GPA boost because of the AP credits. I had AP Chem sophomore year and all I can say is it’s incredibly time consuming and one of the most rigorous AP in my opinion (we had to come in to do a lab during Christmas break), but also an extremely important class that you would need to have on your transcript. AP stat is one of the easiest.
If you know you can handle all of it (and since you’ve only completed freshman year so far, it’s likely too early for you to predict the courseload you’ll want to take on two years from now), then definitely do AP Chem. Hell, even drop one of the other classes (except physics) to fit it in if you need to.
@ri0tvan Would AP Chem be harder than AP Physics C then? I really want to take the class, but I just want to make sure I wouldn’t be making a mistake by ruining my GPA the last time it counts. How much work did you have everyday in Chem? Thanks for helping me out! ;
@Hamlon No problem! I’m not taking AP Physics C til this upcoming year, my senior year, which doesn’t start til Monday but Physics has a lot of calculus in it, it’s a lot of math and I see that you’re good with that, so I feel as though Chem would still be harder. From what I’ve heard, from other students and partly from my own experience, they are both two of the most difficult AP’s.
Seeing that GPA is one of your concerns, I’ll be completely blunt about my experience;
I feel like I’m kinda going back on what I said earlier by telling you this, and it might’ve just been my AP chem class in particular, but the class killed me. We had at least 3 hours of work a night on top of two lab reports each week, and a test each week with very low averages and a teacher who refused to curve grades (and since it was my first and only AP Sophomore year I didn’t really know how to handle it). I did learn a lot from it, but it consumed so much of my time that my other grades started suffering, and of course my GPA suffered as well. And it’s not like I was awful at chemistry; I had a 97% in honors chem the year before. I did miles better junior year, with AP bio, AP calc BC, and AP environmental science, and I can honestly say those AP classes combined were easier than AP chem lol.
All of that being said, I was just a sophomore, my other classes were also very demanding, and I wasn’t interested in the material, so you may have a completely different experience with it. AP chem will look great on your transcript as long as you are interested in the material and believe you can handle the courseload, but if you’re between just chem and physics, physics will likely go smoother.
