<p>yes there are. I bet you at least half of the kids that play basketball at Georgetown and Duke fit your description.</p>
<p>If you feel like you won’t fit well with the kids in your class, you’re not going to fit well with the kids in college either.</p>
<p>Case in point - a kid at my high school has an offer from Princeton and he’s never taken an honors or AP course [though many are offered.] I guess he’s good!</p>
<p>"A few that you did well on counts more than doing fair in a stack of them. "</p>
<p>I did fair in a lot of them. 10 AP courses and 9 honors courses.</p>
<p>I probably would have fared better in the admission process if I had had maybe 6 or so AP courses and spent more time on them.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why you are interested in going to a top 25 academically rated school when you are not interested in taking a challenging curriculum in high school. There’s a disconnect here.</p>
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<p>My top college certainly took it into account if an applicant came from a difficult high school, and my impression was that doing so is standard.</p>
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<p>Then you would/will feel much more intimidated in a highly demanding college, because your peers will mostly be excellent students from all over the country & world, so the bar will be set very high for virtually all your classes (or certainly most of them), and increasingly so in upper division.</p>
<p>This is what I have heard from admissions officers in a few leading schools. In most schools there is one admissions person who is familiar with the school or that district and has an idea as to what curriculum that school offers. If the school does not offer honors or AP classes, then you cannot be expected to take one. Your GC needs to emphasize this and you need to emphasize this in your application. If there were choices and you did not take them, you should have a very good reason for that (e.g. all the honors classes were in Math and Science, but I am interested in music and here is my music portfolio. In this case you should justify what you did in music that was above and beyond what the school offered). In other words, top colleges require you to take the most challenging courses in your context. You have the ability to explain the context and you GC should do that. Also, there are other ways you can get a more rigorous course e.g. the local community college. You can take AP exams by studying on your own. Not easy choices but others have done it in this forum.</p>
<p>Unless your are athlete or your grandfather donated the stadium to the school, you are expected to show that you challenged yourself academically.</p>
<p>I think the more important issue here is your goal of getting into a top 25 without AP/Honors courses. A school that is ranked 25th is going to be virtually as rigorous as a school ranked 5th, with the differences coming in either research or facilities or other things like that. If you feel honors is too much of a burden in high school, then perhaps going to a very rigorous college is not right for you. </p>
<p>Don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t think you’re dumb or anything like that. Just another perspective.</p>
<p>If you don’t think you can handle the hardest high school courses, you probably don’t belong in one of the top universities – however, your grade in the course seems to be OK. If you can maintain your current performance and get beyond your discomfort with honors classes, maybe going to a top 25 school is feasible.</p>
<p>I agree with monstor344</p>
<p>You’re a freshmen? Please save your soul and get off this website and enjoy your life.</p>
<p>Perhaps you know your parents “expect” you to attend a “top 25” school and you don’t feel like that is your niche?</p>
<p>Cause why are you asking the question if you feel like you don’t fit into this honors class?</p>
<p>And yes, the answer is recruited athletes.</p>
<p>I don’t think your grandfather donating the stadium would help, though.</p>
<p>My #1 son got into Carleton (ranks consistently in the top 10) in fall 06 but our small rural high school doesn’t offer any AP/IP/Honors. Carleton was his top choice so we didn’t discuss or visit other schools.
For son #2, we visited lots of schools, and while he was interviewing at Oberlin, I got into a discussion with an admissions dean who plainly stated that they look negatively at students who have those opportunities readily available to take advanced classes and do not. (Of course if they aren’t offered they can’t much hold it against the student.)
IF you are seriously considering a top ranked school and your HS offers advanced classes I would make sure to take at least SOME of them.</p>
<p>take it. stick it out. be tough. you drop this one and your teacher won’t recommend you for honors next year and eventually ap, so you will have to start over riding course recommendations with your guidance counselor. not only should you keep that honors course, but you should go find more of them to take. and unless you live in virginia, north carolina, michigan, or california you aren’t getting into a top school without some serious stats.</p>
<p>They are called “football players”.</p>
<p>I guess I have seen Honors playing a fair deal when you start college. The courses work out simpler when you have done the honors.</p>
<p>Hispanics with A’s.</p>
<p>Take it from an in state parent of two U-Va students – one who graduated and another who just enrolled – in state kids in Virginia are NOT getting into U-Va without “serious stats” and without taking as many honors and AP classes as they can. </p>
<p>My younger student, for example, took 10 AP classes and graduated with over a 4.0 (weighted) GPA from one of the best public high schools in the state (and country). She also had SATs in the middle 50 percent of U-Va’s reported range and good extras. Still, she was waitlisted at U-Va and didn’t get in until mid-June. I also know many, many in state students who were rejected by U-Va and ended up in top private colleges. Remember also that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology – the top public high school in the country, with 150+ National Merit Finalists a year – is in Virginia and sends a quarter of the class or more to U-Va each year. Many of those kids could easily enroll at other top tier colleges. Generally speaking, in state students at U-Va may not have stats at the Ivy level like out of state students, but they are still very, very strong.</p>