<p>Are AP exams pointless if your major in college doesn't even require the AP class you took in high school? For example, if I was studying engineering, would my AP Studio Art credit be useless? Trying to figure out if the exams are worth the 90 bucks if I won't even need them in college...</p>
<p>You can still get credit for the class even if it’s not in your major. You need to take more than just your major classes, so yes, the studio art exam will help you.</p>
<p>People usually take AP classes to get out of distribution requirements, not major-specific classes. </p>
<p>For some reason I still doubt the “distribution requirements” will accept random things like world history or psychology. </p>
<p>It’s going to depend on the college, so take a look at colleges you are interested in to see what sorts of credits they accept.</p>
<p>GE requirements ARE random things like world history and psychology–that’s kind of the point. They’re designed to make you take classes in fields outside of your major. For instance, I used by US history credit to get out of 2 of the 3 classes I needed to take to fulfill a humanities requirement. I got credit for the intro psychology course as well with AP credit, but I double majored in psychology so that credit didn’t really matter to me (although I could have used it to complete a social science GE requirement, if I wanted to). I also got credit for things like biology, chemistry, calculus, etc, but to be honest, the things I really wanted to get out of were the courses I hated in high school, like history and physics. But I went to a school where a lot of AP credit was accepted. You may not, so take a look at what potential schools may accept. Your school may have a fine art requirement, which Studio Art may help you get out of (or at least decrease the requirement). Or it may not. It depends on the school.</p>
<p>And it’s also not just about getting out of courses. Check out how your school does course enrollment. Even if you can’t get out a specific course that you need to graduate, it may still give you extra units to bump up your standing in college. If your school bases enrollment times on the number of units you have, then coming in with more AP credit may help you get a better enrollment time, which would help you make sure you get the courses you need and would help you get the better times and professors. But again, that’s school specific.</p>
<p>Whether or not it’s worth the money though is really up to you. It may be cheaper to just take a course at the local community college and transfer that credit to your future college.</p>
<p>More credits = more power.
Upperclassman dorms early?
Upper Division / Specific Courses that require a certain class standing or amount of units
Priority registration
Even if you’re not hitting your GEs, it can speed up graduation or transferring from a community college as you’ll need a minimum number of units to graduate or transfer. Just engineering is one of the few majors combined with general education that goes over the minimum units so it’s not getting you to that number faster.</p>
<p>Don’t take exams in excess though ~ Once you reap maximum benefits from APs, there’s not much use taking more of them unless you want to be that State AP scholar.</p>