<p>I was wondering if you could take AP courses outside of school (i.e. at colleges, other schools)? At my school, not a lot of APs will fit, since I go to a private school and religion takes up space. As for right now I only have three APs for senior year, and about five or six total. This seems very low compared with some of the other people on this site. How do people from private schools compete against 15 APs?? Is there anyway I can make up lost ground?</p>
<p>Your course rigor is seen in the context of your high school. For example, if your high school only offers 5 APs, and you take 4 or 5 of them, you are fine.</p>
<p>If you wanted to, you could also self-study a couple of APs.</p>
<p>ok, but the problem is that they do offer a lot of pas, but they don’t fit into schedule</p>
<p>which one would you suggest</p>
<p>Or you could enroll in classes at a nearby community college. Or you could take the most demanding course load you can take in your school, and look for other academic challenges outside school that are neither college courses nor “self-studied” APs.</p>
<p>People fixate on APs, I think. To the extent that colleges like APs, they don’t like them because they’re called AP. Colleges want to see that you’ve challenged yourself in your course selection, and that you’ve done well in the classes you’ve taken. APs are one way they try to assess how much you’ve challenged yourself, but they’re not the only way.</p>
<p>Yours isn’t the only high school in the country where students can take only a relatively small number of AP classes. So don’t panic.</p>
<p>When you apply to colleges, your school will send them a document called a Secondary School Report. In the Secondary School Report, your guidance counselor (or some other school official) will give his or her assessment of you demanding your course load was, relative to other students in your school. With the Secondary School Report, they’ll also send your transcript, so colleges can see your course list and your grades, and a document called a school profile. The school profile will give colleges the information they need about your school’s curriculum (and a lot of other things as well).</p>
<p>But if you take the most challenging schedule that’s appropriate for you, and you do well, you’ll get into some colleges or universities that are appropriately demanding. Now, if it’s always been your dream to go to, say, MIT, I can’t guarantee that’ll happen, but adding more APs wouldn’t guarantee it, either.</p>
<p>If they don’t fit into the schedule, then an “in context” view would recognize that because no one would have been able to take a lot of them.</p>
<p>If you want to increase your rigor, you could take classes at a local CC or university, if possible; if not, there are probably guides on here somewhere about which APs to self study. Generally, I have heard Econ/Histories/Psych are easy self studies.</p>