Confusion about future med school goals?

Applying to College
1

I currently have aspirations to attend medical school after college. I am going to be a a senior in high school this coming year and thus have not yet applied to college. However, my questions are general concerns about what it takes to get into medical schools and a few specifics on how AP classes and credits are relevant. Basically, I understand that GPA and the MCAT are of utmost importance when applying to medical school. Because of this, according to many people it is actually advantageous to take easier classes in college in order to maintain a high GPA. However with my AP credits, (I got 5’s in Physics 1 and 2, Calc BC, Statistics, US GOPO, Macro, Lang&Comp, and 4’s in Comp Sci, APUSH, WHAP) I should be exempt for quite a few introductory hours in college due to all the credit hours I have obtained. However, would it be ideal to skip these classes and perhaps take a more advanced course if it hurts my GPA? If GPA is really that important when applying to medical school, wouldn’t it be better to take easier classes in which you have already learned the majority of material in high school? Does this mean that a lot of my AP credits are useless?

*Note that Senior Year I will be taking classes such as AP Chem, Bio, Lit, Spanish and Psych. However it seems as if I might as well not take many of these AP tests because I should take the basic 101’s as a way to boost my GPA anyway.

If anyone has experience with the process of applying to medical school in general, your advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

Check out this discussion on CC about this topic. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/pre-med-topics/1790528-medical-school-prerequisite-courses.html#latest
You still want to take the most rigorous courses in HS to ensure that you are ultimately accepted to a college of your choice to pursue your Undergrad degree.

3

For the med school pre-requisites (Calc, Bio + lab, Chem + lab, Physics) you might still want to re-take them so they show up on you college transcript with a grade and, as you mentioned, they could help your gpa if you are familiar with most of the material (but this may be a wash, since a lot of the intro classes are trying to ‘weed out’ students). Anyways, it is a good idea to have a solid foundation in these courses since they will show up on the MCAT. You can use your credits if you want, but you would be expected to take higher level courses in place which, first semester, I wouldn’t mess around too much with. You can use the other APs you take to knock out other Gen Ed/Humanities requirements if you so choose and accrue credits so you have more flexibility. If I were you, I might still take the AP exams for the science courses just in case a situation arises in which it makes sense to skip a class.