However, just listing the courses and scores without providing context of how the kid managed the workload does not answer the question, and comes off, to me at least, as humblebrag. YMMV
Which is really the bottom line - different schools have different policies. On top of that,different kids have different time management skills.
@skieurope I attempted to address that by saying this is not a typical high school. My oldest is in a magnet program for gifted students,so it is not a heavy workload for that audience. The regular high school programs do not allow students to load up this way. It is the appropriate placement for some kids, and not wildly overachieving which is how many see it when kids have the harder course loads.
My kids go to a large public HS (1800 kids) and it offers 26 AP classes. About a third of the class starts taking AP classes their freshman year and almost everyone will have taken multiple AP classes by graduation.
In some ways I think it might be better to be at a smaller less competitive school where there isn’t so much pressure.
My oldest is taking 14 APs in high school.
My junior is taking 10, and would have taken more but we pushed her hard to take standard art instead of AP Art History her sophomore year. She felt pressured to take an AP class rather than a class she would love for her fine art. Luckily we managed to convince her to go with Art 1, and now she is in Art 2. She’ll take AP Studio Art next year because she is actually excited about it, not for the AP credit.
And different schools may teach the same course differently. When my oldest took Calc BC the homework was to do as many problems as you needed to feel comfortable with the material. For my older son that was not very many, and it was an easy course. APUSH in our school is a reasonable amount of work, but nothing over the top. I’ve heard of students in other schools who spend hours outlining the textbook and other super-stupid stuff.
When counting the number of AP classes do you consider it by year or semester. For example, at D’s HS AP government is 1 semester taken in fall and AP microeconomics is 1 semester and taken in spring. Is this considered two AP classes? Contrast that with APUSH which is a year long course.
Colleges will view in context. AP Gov is a semester equivalent class, but many high schools offer it as a year-long class. Econ is usually a year-long class covering both micro/macro (or as 2 semester courses), but a minority of schools offer micro or macro as a year-long course. I would not get caught up in how colleges “count” them - it really makes little difference.
Our competitive, highly ranked HS doesn’t allow freshmen and sophomores to take AP classes. Juniors can take 2 and seniors 6. My child took 1 junior year and is taking 4 this year. He was accepted to Emory ED and course rigor is very important to them. The AO’s know what’s offered in your high school and take this into account in their review.
My D21 is at a large, competitive public. The school offers 25 APs; most don’t exceed 10. Nobody takes them in 9th grade; only those who have at least a A- in an honors course freshman year can move to AP sophomore year (and they make it tough to get an A-). D will end up with about 6 or 7, I think.
I think most people were just trying to show different examples of how kids can approach double digit APs. I find it interesting what some schools allow compared to others. Here on CC we are all in different states that have different rules.
Back in my day many moons ago in OK if you played sports you never had to take gym. So the gym classes were for the burnouts. It was great because you could get other classes out of the way. By senior year I took 3 classes + one college class one semester and 4 classes the other semester. Talk about a blow off year.
At D19’s school there are plenty of kids that graduate after first semester senior year.
Our school (about 3,000) offers every AP. Many AP courses are taught by more than one teacher, and often the different teachers teach the same course differently. The school has a policy that you can’t switch teachers and there is lots of lamenting by students at the beginning of the year.
The college profile just states the number of AP and honors classes (and lists the honors classes). There is also a sentence that tells how many students took how many exams and how many passed.
Students take 8 classes/year in a block schedule. The school tries to discourage kids taking a full load of AP classes, instead urging the kids to take classes that interest them. I don’t know anyone who takes 8 AP classes per year - those kids are trying to maximize their GPAs and will take a study hall or some other non-graded class as much as possible. PE is required, and no one gets out of it - even if you have a medical condition, you take the class and do what you can.
My D19 had the following schedule at her large public high school that offered 20+AP’s. She also had to take 2 years of PE and elected to take more years of Cheer, and Photojournalism (yearbook). She also only had 1 AP going into junior year. She will end up taking 12 AP tests in the end, She has taken 5 so far and received a score of 4 on two and 5 on three tests. The classes were rigorous, but she never spent more then 2-3 hours at night studying. I don’t think she felt overworked, she has a very active social life outside of school.
9th - no AP allowed, PE required, honors bio, honors english, honors world, Spanish 2, honors alg 2
10th - only 1 AP allowed - APUSH, honors chem, honors english 2, Spanish 3, honors pre-calc, Cheer (2nd year PE required)
11th - AP Chem, AP World, AP Calc BC, AP Lang, Spanish 4, Cheer (elective), Photojournalism (to meet UC art requirement
12th - AP Physics 1 and 2, AP Stats, AP Lit, AP Govt (semester), AP Econ (semester), AP Spanish Lang, Cheer (elective), Photojournalism (elective 2nd year)
Although 12 is a lot, it is no where near the most. She could have taken AP Spanish Lang instead of Spanish 4 and taken AP Spanish Lit senior year. She also could have chosen not to be a cheerleader and taken two additional AP classes, so just in her school she could have taken 15 with a normal course load.
Many kids at her school have 16+ AP’s. They get additional AP’s by self studying outside of school from on-line classes or taking classes at community college or 4 year college nearby.
Thanks for all of the posts! Looking at them, I am realizing I probably underestimated the AP classes available at my daughters high school - it never occurred to me that there would be AP Art, for example. Clearly, we were never on this track and, though I began this thread tempted to get on it with D22, I no longer feel that temptation.
My kid’s (very large) school’s offerings, where everything’s a full-year course except Micro/Macro, which is a full-year sequence:
9th grade: 0
10th grade: 4 (US History, Euro, CS Principles, Physics 1)
11th grade: 24-26 (everything but Lit; two of the foreign languages are theoretically only 12th but in practice that rule can be waived by teacher recommendation)
12th: 26 (everything but Lang)
Number of sections (section size ranging from 1 to ~25) offered this calendar year:
Studio Art 2D 18
Studio Art Drawing 12
English Language 8
United States History 8
Studio Art 3D 6
Psychology 4
World History 4
Art History 3
English Literature 3
Physics 1 - Algebra Based 3
Biology 2
Calculus AB 2
Calculus BC 2
European History 2
Government and Politics, US 2
Macroeconomics 2
Microeconomics 2
Statistics 2
Chemistry 1
Computer Science Principles 1
Environmental Science 1
French Language 1
Latin 1
Music Theory 1
Physics 2 - Algebra Based 1
Physics C Mech. 1
Spanish Language 1
No PE or other non-academic course requirements, 6 courses per year. The kid with the most APs usually has ~14. Rumor mill has it that ~10 years ago, there was a pact amongst a large group of kids to limit themselves to 8 APs; the ones who got As in all of them all tied for a class rank of 3rd. In the absence of such a pact, 8 would likely result in top 3%, but not top 1%.
Our #1 took a reasonable number of AP courses, but hardly every available one. This was his choice, and based on the idea that he had very demanding EC’s! These were policy debate and editor of the school newspaper. He had considerable success on those school-related EC’s. He also was smart enough to do well on AP and other tests with minimal prep. So we didn’t object when he told us he wasn’t going to enroll in AP US Gov, for example. (But then it turned out that he didn’t like the teacher and he earned a B (3.0) in that non-AP Gov. Oh well.)
This decision didn’t reflect any lack of academic talent. He got extremely high test scores with hardly any prep. And his major hobbies later became the basis of his career after college. But he had a sense of balance even in high school. He worked very long hours, but he also gave himself a break now and then, while his hobbies were engaging intellectually and also contributed to his long-term career.
There are several AP art classes: art history, 2D, 3D and drawing. In the studio classes, kids submit portfolios of about 20 or so pieces along with statements about the creative processes in their artwork. I’m not sure of the exact details, but it’s my understanding that some of the artwork in the portfolio runs a gamut and some of the artwork has a specific design focus.
@Turquoise52 We tried to convince our D19 to only take 4 APs junior year. She wanted the 5th. Then 2-3 weeks into the semester she wanted to drop one. We wouldn’t let her. We had done some stuff to make sure she could take that 5th one.
It probably wasn’t needed, but that is what she wanted to do. I do think it helped with the ACT.
The biggest difference we’ve seen is whether your high school requires a high school level class before taking the AP version, it makes a huge difference on the number of AP courses you’ll be able to fit into your schedule. My kids’ district requires the student complete the high school version first, so there are no freshman in AP courses with the exception of a handful of kids who take the AP version of a foreign language, either because they were in a dual language middle school or speak a second language at home. It’s impossible to fit all the AP science classes in after taking the high school versions first. The neighboring district allows AP courses without ever taking a high school class in the subject. Many of those kids are taking 15+ over 4 years.
D high school does not allow freshmen or sophomores to take any AP. Juniors and seniors can take an average of 2 APs per year. Any student wanting to take more than 2 APs per year needs approval from GC, parents and teachers.
D ended up with 4 APs (1 in junior and 3 in senior). Top students from her HS had an average of 4-6 APs.
Reading here that students have taken 10+ APs by the time they finish HS. That sounds crazy to me.
I looked at our high school profile - it offers 15 APs and 7 honors classes. Due to prereqs, only juniors and seniors can take APs. Kids take 6-7 classes per day. The profile says 6 APs is norm. I remember asking the GC at parents night freshman year whether it was better to get an A in a regular class or a B in an AP and his response being, “it’s better to get an A in a AP class.” In that exact moment, I dropped us out of HS ratrace.
DS 19 goes to a competitive large (3000) public high school. They offer 28 AP classes and it isn’t typical, but also not unusual to see kids with between 14 and 17 tests, (12 to 15 classes as year-long Physics C and Econ are both 2 tests.) I think there are several reasons for this:
DS19 took 1 AP freshman year (human geo), 4 sophomore year (chem, calc bc, world history and comp sci A), 4 junior year (phys 1, lang, us, gov), and 6 senior year (bio, phys c, euro, comp gov, lit, and chinese). The workload has been manageable–he uses his off period carefully and often has an additional half hour or so of homework each night.
I don’t think kids feel compelled to take tons of APs–there isn’t a big valedictorian push or anything–so kids are encouraged to take AP if they want to, but they don’t have to. Still, about half of the kids take at least one AP during their 4 years, and the school has a 85%+ rate of kids scoring 3 or better, so I think the school is doing pretty well at supporting kids and helping them manage.