Hi! I’m not sure which AP exams to take this year! I’m definitely taking AP Gov and AP Lit, because I know that it will allow me to fulfill certain reqs, but I’m not sure about AP Psychology and AP Environmental Science. Do they carry any weight when it comes to transfer credit or skipping general electives?
Also, when I was completing my UC application, I said that I planned to take all four. Now, when I access CalCentral, it’s under the “tasks” page to send my official score reports for them. Do I have to take them, though? I didn’t realize that what I put on the UC application with respect to future AP Exams might be binding.
AP Lit is the one useful one, if you can get a 5. A 5 gives you subject credit and allows you to skip out of both English R&C classes. The others, if you get 3+ will give you graduation credit and when added up may give you give you an advanced class status (useful for registration) but that’s about it. Not useable for much else. You can’t use AP credits to fulfill any of the required 7 breadth classes.
@Melanie786 As @ProfessorPlum168 said, go for AP Lit, otherwise you may be stuck taking Reading and Composition required courses, which, as a CS person, you may not be fond of very much. In addition, if your major eventually requires Math, then AP Calculus BC gives you out of jail card for the first two math courses (1A and 1B). My calculations and experience tell me that if you get enough APs, you may be able to get 2.5 semesters (or more) worth of elective credits, and that may shorten the time you pay for the undergraduate semesters, or allow you to triple major or whatever.
Although some of the AP scores besides English may not give you anything toward graduation besides elective units, they may give you prerequisites to other courses. For example, AP psychology may let you into more advanced psychology courses without needing to take Psychology 1, if you decide to take out of major courses in that subject.
you do get subject credit for Psych 1 if you get a 4 or a 5. This gets into a tricky area though. For example, let’s say you got a 5 in AP Psych and you got the subject credit for Psych 1. if you were a Data Science major (many CS folks double major in DS or go to DS if they don’t get admitted into CS) and have your Domain Emphasis in say Cognition or Neuroscience, you may have to take Psych 1 over again if you wanted to take upper division Psych classes. (you probably still can take upper division classes in Psych without taking the class, but you would still need to retake Psych 1 or find some other substitute at some point). That’s because Data Science doesn’t accept AP classes to fulfill their domain emphasis classes. I speak from experience on this - my kid’s AP credits in Biology, Chem and Psych are all useless in his case, as a CS/DS major, since he can’t go to a more advanced class in his domain emphasis without re-taking the beginning class over again.
For UC-Berkeley L&S, by far the most useful AP credits will be getting a 5 in AP Eng Lit and AP Calc BC. Any others are, meh.
The cognition and neurosciences emphases in the data science major do not explicitly require Psychology 1, Biology 1A/1AL or 1B, or Chemistry 1A/1AL: https://data.berkeley.edu/degrees/domain-emphasis .
In terms of prerequisites for upper division MCB courses, MCB does allow its majors to skip Biology 1A/1AL and 1B with a 4 on AP biology, but does recommend that students retake Biology 1A/1AL anyway: http://mcb.berkeley.edu/undergrad/advising/advising-office/freshmen#13 . It also allows skipping Chemistry 1A/1AL with a 4 on AP chemistry.
yes, but other domain emphases do require Biology or Chem (see Computational Biology). You’re getting off track here. AP credits for subject credit are good only if you plan on pursuing upper level classes that might require that lower class. Otherwise it’s nothing more than elective credit. A CS major at Berkeley might take upper level classes in one area and thus one AP class might be of use, but there’s no way he or she will use the combination of Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, US History, etc. That was the main point - the AP credits for L&S is good for graduating early, it is good for getting a good registration time, but by and large don’t do much else.
It appears that one of the links in post #2 leading to a list of links to AP credit policies by L&S department got broken during the forum change to the new platform.
The correct link is here:
However, since the post is a few years old, some departmental web sites may have been changed.
