<p>If not are you better off just taking the intro classes to boost your GPA for Med. School application?</p>
<p>Anybody???</p>
<p>No, most AP credits are just elective credits and do not count for major/premed requirements.</p>
<p>^Right. They’re essentially used for placement into a higher class for a lot of the AP’s, or elective credit as Poeme mentioned.</p>
<p>Take it from me, as a premed, ap classes DONT place you higher. The most they do is give you a random elective credit. You still have to take intro classes, and the credit does nothing for gpa</p>
<p>^ Thx. What is your Frosh year schedule?</p>
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<p>Think this through: how could they? The credits come from an exam score, and not from any course grade you may have earned. (Or, indeed, may not have earned. My daughter got a 4 on the US History AP without ever having taken AP US History. And if you read College Confidential much, you’ll see that there are hundreds of busy little beavers eagerly “self-studying” AP exam review books all over the message board.) So even if a university were inclined to include AP credits when computing students’ grade-point averages, what grade would they use?</p>
<p>I don’t know,that’s why I asked. All college would have to do is read the applicants transcript. In my son’s case they would see he took the AP classes & exams & got a score of 5 on all of them.Plus he took the SAT subject tests and scored high 700’s</p>
<p>But that still wouldn’t give Penn much basis for assigning a grade. Would Penn really want to say that the A your son got in his high-school AP class represents the same level of work and mastery as an A earned at Penn? I don’t think it would. </p>
<p>Most universities only allow students to transfer in “credit,” as opposed to the grades they earned, for courses they took in other colleges and universities. I can’t imagine they’d be more generous in their policies for course work done in high school.</p>
<p>^ I hear you. It makes sense assigning a grade wouldn’t be pratical.</p>
<p>And I understand that it wouldn’t occur to a person even to think about this question until…well, until he or she had a reason to think about it.</p>
<p>^ So would you subscribe to the notion that since GPA seems to be very important for Med. School applications that you’re better off taking the intro courses reqd. hoping to get the “easy” A??</p>
<p>That might be true, except that (a) many, many other premeds have the same notion, (b) such classes are almost always graded on a curve, so therefore (c) it is still extremely difficult to stay at the front of the curve when so many similarly-minded people are competing for the same position. Also, at least at some universities, the harder, more advanced versions of the same classes are graded on a more generous curve, so that a larger percentage of students get grades that would be acceptable to medical schools (as long as they put in the work for it).</p>
<p>^ I got you. In our case we’re UPenn specific.There seems to be passionate views on whether to major in a science for pre med or an easier major to shoot for an easier track to a hi GPA.</p>