I’ve been stuck on whether or not I should do ap us history or normal us history. At my school, normal us history is painfully easy but the teacher for apush isn’t that good and there’s a big workload. My schedule for next year would be:
AP Chem
APLAC
Calculus
Spanish 4
(AP?) US History
The other three are electives that I won’t worry about too much. There’s also no free period
Spanish 4 at my school is pretty hard, harder than AP Spanish (which is Spanish 5). I’m just worried about the workload and that if there’ll be so much that I struggle in my other classes. I’ve taken AP Bio and APHG my freshman and sophomore year and have an unweighted 4.0 gpa with the rest of my classes being honors. Freshman year I only got an A- in aphg because I slacked off at the beginning of the year and underestimated it, but the rest of my classes have been pretty much A+.
Our high school is similar… the regular US History class is easy, but APUSH is two hours of homework each night. Two extremes, no middle choice.
If your guidance counselor and teachers suggest APUSH, then give it a try. It’s easier to drop down a level after a few weeks if you find yourself struggling than it is to bump up if you’re bored.
Have you talked to the teachers and previous students to get a sense of the difficulty and the workload? It really is different for every school, so the advice on this is going to be very general.
I agree with @Groundwork2022. My D had no real choice but to take APUSH as a 9th grader this year. It’s a lot of reading and her teacher (who fortunately was excellent) required very detailed note-taking on all reading assignments which was very time consuming. In spite of the work, my D was really glad she didn’t end up in regular US History which would have been a cakewalk but also would have bored her to tears.
If you have the time to devote to it, I would give it a try (and then drop down as need be). Good luck!
Sounds a lot like my school in terms of the spanish thing. Also very similar schedule to mine junior year, swapping calc with pre calc and adding CSA.
APUSH will be a lot of work at pretty much any school, but it wasn’t too tough at mine - certainly not as tough as chem. If you’re a good enough student and think you might be able to handle it, then definitely go for it. If it ends up being too demanding, you can always drop it.
If you’re aiming for high tier schools, you do want that “Most demanding courses” box checked off by your guidance counselor.
Yes, my counselor told me that it would be a lot of work for me but she told me I’m pretty well-rounded so it’s possible I could handle it. She just recommended that I not do APUSH so that I could focus more of my time on my extracurriculars. I do want to attend “prestigious” schools (probably not ivies tho), but my counselor said that it’s better to not have the most demanding courses with lots of extracurriculars than only taking the hardest classes. I also talked to one classmate who’s a year older and he told me that my schedule would be really tough since we’ll have similar schedules and it’s one of the hardest schedules he’s seen 
and it doesn’t help that he himself is an extremely well-rounded student. I’ll see if I can follow the advice and just take APUSH and possibly drop down. Thank you all for the intake! 