<p>My school offers CP (regular) classes, honors, classes, and AP classes. By the end of senior year, I will have taken 10 honors classes and 3 AP classes. I know APs are more rigorous courses, but do colleges still consider honors courses as showing that a student took a rigorous course load? I've been stressing out over the fact that I'll only have 3 APs, but will the 10 honors courses work strongly in my favor for admissions as well?</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>Of course. You also have a GC to consult about this, right?</p>
<p>@BrownParent yes I do, however my high school is extremely large so he does not know me well and I can’t get appointments with him often. Also thank you for your input!</p>
<p>It really might depend on how common AP classes are in your school. If there’s a limit on the number of APs you can take, either through a quota or just not many on offer, then the honors classes would come into play. If you could have taken many more AP classes instead of honors, then the honors classes will be worth considerably less.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 we’re offered 17, but one student cannot possibly take 17, because of requirements and the number of classes that can be taken at a time. One might be able to take 10, and the only person I know who did that went to Harvard. A girl took less than that and got into Brown. I have my reasons for not taking more than 3 (severe anxiety that I’m finally overcoming), so I can talk about that if it seems like something that would hurt me otherwise</p>
<p>It depends on where you want to apply, but at 99%+ of the colleges in the US, this is fine. Honors classes definitely show that you wanted to do more than the regular class level, and are a bonus. Do you have HYPS aspirations? Honestly, below that, I think it does not matter much if at all. Plus, if you are working to overcome severe anxiety, a top 5 school in any category (university, LAC, etc.) might not be the best college environment anyway. Regarding the anxiety disorder, consider carefully if you want to disclose. Colleges with low acceptance rates are looking for reasons to move applications to the rejection pile (they have to winnow them somehow when they get a lot of apps from qualified students), so this could give them the reason. </p>
<p>@intparent no I’m not applying to any Ivys, but I am looking at pretty up-there LACs (Oberlin, Vassar, Skidmore, Dickinson, Macalester). Do you think I’d still be a candidate at schools like that? I scored well on the ACT (31, 32 superscored) have strong ECs, I’ll get good recs, and my essay should be stellar (not trying to be arrogant but I’m very strong at writing). If you think explaining about my anxiety will hinder me, then I guess I’ll think twice before doing that, and I’ll talk to my counselor about it too.</p>
<p>What’s your GPA?</p>
<p>Yes, college will consider your honors classes in the rigorous assessment. Look at the following link from UCLA as an example:
<a href=“http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/adm_fr/Frosh_Prof13.htm”>http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/adm_fr/Frosh_Prof13.htm</a>
Look for the high school course work listed near the bottom.</p>
<p>@CHD2013 3.86 unweighted, about 4.7 weighted. I’m in the top 6% or 7% of my class</p>
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<p>Yes, you should be a candidate at those schools. If you can improve your test scores a little bit you’ll be a better candidate.</p>
<p>A couple of thoughts here:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I’m familiar with anxiety issues, my daughter suffers from them and is in treatment for it. In her, it comes out as perfectionism - which makes multiple choice tests difficult. (All the answers look good, and she second guesses correct answers.) It’s taken three years, but those tests are finally becoming a little easier. It did impact her ACT, it does impact her AP tests, but we were never going to ask for accommodation.(Getting more time on a test only gives her more time to question every answer.) Severe anxiety is something that can and should be treated professionally, not just dealt with. A little anxiety turns out to be a good thing, a lot was debilitating and was threatening her physical health.</p></li>
<li><p>You’ve got the right test scores and GPA for the schools you’re looking at, but the real issue may be your course rigor. With 17 APs available, 6-8 should have been possible, only 3 may keep you from getting the “most rigorous” recommendation, which might impact schools like Vassar, Oberlin, and Macalester. You should still apply, of course, but if there’s any chance of upping your load to 3 APs senior year, you should consider it, it will help. But not at the expense of your health, obviously. (Sidenote: Our HS has 22 APs available, and those students who took 6 APs but dodged the tough ones and had a 32-33 ACT and nearly a 4.0 UW did not make it into Vassar or Bowdoin. You never know why, might be ECs, might be essays, but they were shocked. YMMV.)</p></li>
<li><p>Mental health issues are tricky to deal with in college applications. As mentioned above, some colleges will walk away from students that have them, though they will never admit to that. You need to be honest with your GC, they should be able to make the call on how to deal with it (or not) in their recommendation. You should never use it as an excuse in interviews or anywhere in your application. It is not an essay topic, under any circumstances.</p></li>
<li><p>My daughter made it into a top 15 LAC with lower test scores than yours, slightly higher GPA, but 10 APs. I think your test scores will make you equally competitive, how the APs play out remain to be seen. Essays may well be the deciding factor, I see an awful lot of people stumbling on them by not asking for advice and not wanting to hear critical opinions, including topic selection. My advice would be to really concentrate on the essays, regardless of whether or not you can ramp up your APs, and pick a positive topic that gives your application voice. Good luck.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>@MrMom62 that was so helpful, thank you! AP classes are so tricky in my high school. To be quite honest, I planned on taking more, but many of the AP teachers are… not ideal, to put it nicely. I found it more beneficial to take an honors level class where I knew the teacher was passionate about the subject and I would be able to immerse myself in the information, instead of an AP class where I’d learn next to nothing just to look more competitive. I’ve decided it’s probably not a good idea to mention my anxiety, but would it be worth speaking about how I picked my classes because I value quality of education over merely looking good on paper?
Also, although 17 AP classes seems like a fair amount, none are offered to freshman and very few are offered to sophomores. The most I could have taken I believe is 9, calculating in the level of courses I came in with from middle school. (And maybe even less, because our science APs are double periods, so they knock out spots for other courses). So technically I’m taken 1/3 of what I could, versus 3/17. But will admissions offices even realize this?</p>
<p>I’m not sure I get how you know which teachers are ideal and which are not, but I understand the idea that you’re going for. At least at our HS, the best teachers usually teach the AP classes, although that’s sometimes not the case when they first teach the AP class. But if any one teacher has been teaching an AP class for years, trust me, they’re passionate about it. And classmates above you can certainly tell you who’s a great teacher and who is not, even if they are incredibly tough and demanding.</p>
<p>Our HS has no freshman level AP classes, although there are always a few accelerated freshman who can take them. Technically, there is only one sophomore level AP class (World), although if you look closely at the prerequisites and ask, there are really four (World, Euro, Enviro, and Micro). My daughter took two (World and Micro), pioneering sophomore entry into Micro, and it’s still rare, but more kids do it now because it gets them out of Personal Finance. All the rest are really junior and senior classes and kids aiming for the elite level schools will take 3-4 per year, so the max really is 10 out of 22, unless you’re insane and take 5 or 6 junior or senior year, which almost no one does because the college advisor talks them out of it.</p>
<p>I don’t think talking about how you pick your classes is a particularly good essay topic - it doesn’t really say much about you, other than what everyone thinks about themselves, that they’re not superficial, when you know that 90% of them totally are. It’s got to be much more personal than that - trying identifying an “Ah ha!” moment that changes how you think about the world or what you want to do with your life or just discover a new passion to pursue.</p>
<p>Finally, I wouldn’t worry so much about trying to put yourself in the ideal situation, class-wise… That’s always a consideration, you really don’t want a bad teacher, but sometimes in life, you have to bite the bullet and take the tough class under less than perfect conditions. You certainly will in college - and colleges appreciate those students who take on the tough challenges, even at a cost to themselves. That’s part of what they look for.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 I didn’t mean I thought of using it as an essay topic, I meant should I say something about it in the “your space” area (should have clarified, sorry). On the topic of “not ideal” teachers… for example, the junior AP Lang teacher is technically “qualified” to teach the class, but she is so bad to the point where many of her students don’t even take the AP exam because they do not feel prepared at all for it. Because of this, I opted for English III Honors this year, and I’m enjoying the (rigorous) work pretty much every day.
To be honest I’m just worried. I’m an extremely hard worker and put 110% effort and passion into everything I do, and I don’t want colleges to think I’m any less passionate or hard-working just because I don’t have as many APs as the last application they read. I don’t want my lesser amount of AP to be the factor that moves me from “accept” to “deny” if everything else looked good.</p>
<p>But not taking the APs may be the very reason that tips the scales against you - even if you had a very good reason for not taking them. It’s hard to know what goes through the mind of an admission officer, but they’re going to evaluate your transcript separately from your essays, so the two may never get connected. Try and find the Washington Post article from March about admissions at GWU - they specifically criticize students in the admissions process for dodging certain classes, and I believe AP Lang is one of them. It may not be fair, but they will do it, especially when so many students who had it available did take it. (It’s very much about quality as well as quantity of APs.)</p>
<p>There comes a point where learning in the classroom shifts from the teacher’s responsibility to the student’s. College classes are like that and it’s possible some of your classmates expect AP classes to be more like HS classes - everything is spoon-fed and explicitly stated. If you need more explanation, you need to pursue it, not wait to have it delivered. D had a few first year AP teachers who were not that good, but she worked hard enough on her own to make the class worthwhile, and that doesn’t mean a 4 or 5 on the test either. Other, more qualified teachers hit every class running, not covering the material, but instead discussing it as if you had already gone over it - a terrible shock to many of her classmates who assumed that everything on the test would simply be parroting back what was told to them in class. They (and sometimes their parents) complained bitterly until they were told that’s how it was - the 20-30 pages of reading per class were not a “suggestion”, they were what you needed to do before class to be prepared.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 maybe it’s only a small school thing to do, but every single school I’ve visited so far (all small LACs), have said that your entire application is reviewed holistically and all together. So my essay would be right there with my transcript and everything else. It’s just frustrating that not having as many APs will make me look weaker when I know the AP atmosphere at my school (less-then-mediocre teachers, boatloads of cheating… and I promise I’m not making this up, I have friends in AP classes this year). Personally I felt like the only way to make the most of my high school education was to NOT take many APs, because of the way they work at my school. Again, very frustrating because admissions cannot see this.</p>
<p>They do view applications holistically, that doesn’t mean they review them that way. Read “The Gatekeepers” to get an idea of how they look at applications at an elite LAC. The admission season that’s written about was 15 years ago, that doesn’t mean the methodology has changed - it’s still pretty accurate.</p>
<p>Basically, your transcript is going to get evaluated and graded into one of four levels, highly qualified, qualified, marginal, and unqualified. (Not all schools do it this way, but it’s a common model for LACs.) Most acceptances will be from the top two categories - but I’m guessing that without the APs, you’ll be put in the qualified category. That won’t eliminate you, it just sets a higher bar for the rest of your application.</p>
<p>I would not worry about this for that list of schools at all (and I have visited most of them, one of my kids attended Dickinson, and the other was accepted to Mac last year). Don’t sweat it, and do not even mention any worries about it in your application or essay. Keep your essays and information on the best picture/package of yourself that you can present. Do not make excuses or talk about things outside of your control. Even though this is stressful to you, don’t let it seep into your application.</p>