<p>I really don't like the idea of spending the whole year gearing for one test.
There are subjects I love that Iwould take an AP of, but there are people who take 6 APs a year!
Do top schools really care if I take Honors Chemistry over A.P Chemistry?
All my classes are honors, and I'm taking an AP or two next year, but my school offers quite a few APs.</p>
<p>Am I screwed because I want to ENJOY my classes?</p>
<p>Top schools definitely look for AP classes, and this doesn’t mean that you have to go to an extreme and take 6+ AP classes, but schools do want to see that you are challenging yourself with difficult classes. If you are passionate for a certain topic, then you should try to take the AP.
Multiple benefits of AP:
-boost to college app
-potential college credit
-challenging yourself=better prepared for college coursework</p>
<p>It will probably put you at a disadvantage to only take a few APs, especially when your school offers so many. I don’t think it will completely eliminate the possibility of being accepted to top schools, but it will make it harder.</p>
<p>I’m going to take 8 APs during my high school career, but my school offers 15!
I just turned down AP Psychology because I wanted to do a class I really loved… was that a bad idea?</p>
<p>It isn’t a bad idea to turn down an AP if you have enough rigor in your schedule already.</p>
<p>But is 8/15 enough for Stanford or Brown or Harvard?</p>
<p>Probably…my school offers 19, but I don’t think anyone’s ever taken more than 10 or so and still had good EC’s. I’m only taking 7.</p>
<p>I’ve read in several places that 2 per year (aka 6 total if you begin as a soph) is a fantastic number, however, I’m not sure I buy it. I think having 1 AP sophomore year, 2 junior, and 3 or 4 senior is plenty. I on the other hand chose to kill myself and took 2 sophomore, 3 junior, and will be taking 5 senior year. But oh well.</p>
<p>^ Depends entirely on what your school offers, there is no set “good number”. For example, my school offers 27 APs and the top students in every class usually take around 10-15.</p>
<p>yeah. at the same time, a girl in the harvard forums made a really good point- it’s also important to enjoy your high school experience instead of doing everything for college purposes.
I think 8/15 is fine…I thought you were talking about taking only 1-2 total.</p>
<p>It is a good idea to take as many APs as you can reasonably handle.</p>
<p>It all depends on the teachers, I think. Some teachers are awful AP teachers and give you an easy A, which looks good on college apps ;). I have had 1 AP teacher where all we did was play cards and I got an A! That was AP Chemistry, yup I got a 1 on the test. AP History was the most challenging for me, next to AP Biology (almost got a B! Got like a 90.0!), AP English is all writing so it just depends if the teacher grades on an inflation or not. Some students overload on AP because they either like the challenge or they heard that it was an easy A that looks good on their transcript.</p>
<p>your school offers 27 AP’s? mine only offers 7.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really how many your school offers. My school offers around 15 to 20, but everybody self-studies and somebody ended up taking all but 1 AP German or something. Don’t rely on your school. Sign up for the exams and study them yourself if you can.</p>
<p>^ Said student was fluent in Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Latin and adept in Computer Science, Studio Art and Music Composition?</p>
<p>Your AP Chem class played cards! Seriously? It’s killer here & 1.5hrs/day. Once class for lab, and one for lecture. A lot of people skip it and go on to physics & then one to forensics.
We have too many APs to count, but they are not available to everyone as we have a speciality magnet. A student who is not IT can’t take the AP classes in that department. I have no idea how that’s judged, nor do I care. We can only take one AP soph yr, then it opens up Jr & Sr year.</p>
<p>i heard that some colleges don’t like applicants with too many AP scores of 5 because then those applicants will get more credit and won’t spend as much money on tuition</p>
<p>Yeah, my school definately varies in AP difficulty. My psych class was, basically, copying vocab words, whereas my english class was doing about 3 different textbooks and a million essays. I am taking four ap classes and ACE academy (which is an internship program that runs the last hour of the day for hs seniors) next year, and I have only taken three so far, so, for both our sakes, I hope we’ll be fine.</p>
<p>and, good God sic_infit, I hope that is not true.</p>
<p>Yeah I’m taking 8 out of 8 AP classes that my school offers so it shoud be good.</p>
<p>Yeah, like TLB said, the difficulty varies. My AP USH II class was so chill, but Lang & Comp was intense. I had a timed writing pretty much every week and a book analysis every quarter. In AP Bio, the content was kinda difficult but that class was the most legit crazy class I ever had.</p>