Course Selection Help

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

I am currently picking my courses for high school, and I just wanted your opinion on the courses that I currently want. My school currently offers 18 AP classes, and with this schedule I’ll be taking 12 AP classes. Will this be a good course selection for ivy league schools, and Is the amount of Advanced Placement classes too many, too little? NOTE: My school doesn’t allow students to take Advanced Placement classes in their freshman year, and it is a block schedule of four classes each semester.

9th Grade

Semester 1
Integrated Math 2 Honors
English 09 Honors
Music Theory
Physical Education I / Health

Semester 2
Integrated Math 3 Honors
U.S. History 1860-1929 Honors
Spanish 2
Physical & Earth Science Honors

10th Grade

Semester 1
Integrated Math 4 Honors
Physical Education
AP Language and Composition
AP Music Theory

Semester 2
Biology & Chemistry Honors
U.S. History 1930- Present Honors
AP Statistics
Business, Finance & Marketing Essentials (CORE)

11th Grade

Semester 1
AP Calculus AB
AP Chemistry
AP World History
Spanish 3

Semester 2
AP Calculus AB
AP Literature & Composition
AP Art History
AP Chemistry

12th Grade

Semester 1
AP Government and Politics: United States
AP Calculus BC
Spanish 4
AP Physics 1

Semester 2
AP Physics 1
AP Calculus BC
College Class: Critical Reading & Writing
AP Spanish

Thanks for reading.

2

There is no reason to take both AB and BC Calc. You would be better off taking BC junior year and dual enrollment multi variable Calc senior year. 12 is an awful lot of AP classes.,if you look at national data on the college board website only several thousand out of 3.3m take this many tests. D is taking 9 classes and 11 tests in a school that offers 23 and she has applied to several Ivys. Until you know if you can handle the workload, I wouldn’t advise quite such an AP heavy curriculum. You will get into an Ivy or not based on many factors, academic rigor is just one of them. If you are so bogged down you can’t do ECs or run for study for ACT or SAT or visit colleges you will regret it

3

Actually, the calculus thing isn’t quite like that at all schools.
In some schools,BC is semester two, in other schools it’s semesters one and two. If BC is only second semester (of a college Calc course) then it wouldn’t be feasible to go straight to BC. I’m not in AP’s (yet) so I can’t comment on time commitment, although I do want to ask, will it be more difficult to take the AP exam when you haven’t had the class in nearly a semester? For ones like music theory, world history, or art history, I would only take those if you actually want to, not for the sake of taking AP’s, as these tend to be considered ‘softer’ classes.