This year, I will be a sophomore at a highly competitive school in my area, and because it is so competitive, I was curious about how colleges look at certain schools.
Many students in my grade will be taking 3+ AP classes as sophmores, which is an extremely big number for the second year in high school. Last year, I took 1 AP, and this year, I am taking 1 AP (and potentially self-studying AP Statistics), while many students took 2 (some took 3) AP classes.
The fact that many students at my school are high achievers and can handle multiple AP classes honestly scares me. I try to balance out my courseload to fit my schedule, with one decision to step down from Spanish 3 Honors but I can’t help but wonder if colleges will look at my application, compare me to the rest of the school, and look down on me because of my rigor compared to those students.
I took 4 Honors classes in my freshman year, and will do 3 this year. I am in the Beta and Key Clubs (plan to join HOSA this year), and have a varsity letter in Cross Country already and plan to receive one for Tennis later this year. I also swim and plan to pursue parkour later on.
Will my extracurricular activities help keep me afloat when colleges look at my application compared to other students at my school? Or will I likely be overshadowed by the number of students taking so many AP classes.
Yes.
If your GC rates your schedule as less rigorous that your peers applying to the same colleges, no amount of EC’s will make up for the fact that your schedule is less rigorous.
FYI - This is College Confidential. Do not post identifying information; I deleted the name of your HS.
Colleges which use class rank in admission do compare students from the same high school.
Sorry about that! Just starting out
Yes for sure. In many cases students don’t get in schools because of this, not because of their qualifications. It is exceptionally bad at Catholic schools because the kids all apply to the same schools.
One more question: Is it better to take 11+ APs and get A’s and B’s? Or is it better to take 6-8 AP classes and get all A’s?
Do they compare you to people from your school who aren’t applying to that college?
Example: I got 35/36 ACT [best 1 sitting, superscore] and 2130/2140 SAT [best 1 sitting, superscore]. I’m applying to Stanford, but I don’t think anyone else from my small town public school is going to apply. My principal commented on how my scores were basically one of the highest, if not the highest, he’s ever seen.
The stock admissions answer is to take the harder schedule and get all A grades.
That said, that range of the number of AP courses is usually considered to be where you will find diminishing returns – particular if the first 6 include the more rigorous AP courses (e.g. English, calculus BC, US history, a foreign language, a science other than ES) and the additional ones are the “light” ones (e.g. psychology, statistics, environmental science, human geography, etc.).
They compare your GPA as they can generally see what decile you fall into. They do not compare test scores, because they would not have access to those.