My school is pretty AP-heavy, with top-performing students taking 5-6 APs in their junior year.
I am set to take 6 ap classes including Latin 5, lang, csa, chem, apush, and calc bc.
All my friends are taking APUSH in their junior year, but I am planning on taking honors us history instead. This is because they have completed AP chemistry last year, while I am taking it this year. I think it would be difficult to have apush and chem in the same year.
Would it look bad to college admissions if I took an honors course while everyone else took the AP?
Depends on the college but you need to take the right classes for you. Even if you had zero AP classes, there are great colleges out there for you.
Sometimes it’s more important to have the better teacher or more motivated classmates so in that sense would APUSH be better?
Don’t know what type of college you are looking at but in a general sense, for most colleges, this is a non-issue. Elite colleges - perhaps - but in most cases - no.
D20 took APUSH, hated the course - scored a 5 on the test. D23 chose not to take APUSH, is taking honors US history and is so much happier than her friends in APUSH.
Taking APUSH or not taking APUSH will not be the difference between getting into or getting rejected from any college. It just won’t.
Take the classes you want to take, and then find the colleges that will be excited to accept you when you are applying.
I know someone that was part of admissions at MIT, it’s more important to set yourself up for success with rigor, but it doesn’t have to be rigor outside of your expected major/interests and it doesn’t have to be every AP class that you can take. If you’re planning on being a History major, then take APUSH and drop one of the others. If you’re more STEM oriented, don’t even second guess not taking APUSH.
Chem and CalcBC are tough, not to mention your other APs. CollegeVine allows you to chance the schools play with that if you’d like to see what one more/less AP course will do. I’m betting money that it will not move the needle with a course load like yours.
Im looking towards selective colleges. I have been doing APUSH for a week, and the classmates and teacher are great. The only problem is the class has alot of homework and I already have 5 other APs
If you’re enjoying your teacher and classmates after a week, I guess before dropping to Honors the thing I’d suggest is trying to find out if there would actually be a meaningful decrease in homework vs APUSH, because to a certain extent history is history and there’s going to be quite a bit of reading.
Thanks so much! the college vine chance thing is awesome!
Yes, I wish I had found it/it existed before my son took all of his APs junior year. Would have been nice to have some confirmation that it didn’t matter that much.
It’s not a perfect science (any chancing calculator), but when it jives with what a trusted source is telling me it seems to confirm that stretching yourself too thin with APs is a bad idea.
Best of luck to you @happybiolover, sounds like you’re doing great things - just keep yourself grounded and don’t get lost in the fact that your HS is a bunch of overachievers. I liked that fact that Stuyvesant HS caps the number of APs to 4 per year (page 3 of their HS profile).
The course rigor metric is a continuum, but once you get above 8 or so APs over your HS career, it’s a very flat curve, IMO. Will it make “a difference”? Probably. Will it be meaningful? Probably not.
And that’s at the schools with the most competitive application pools. At schools where the average student takes 2-3 APs, the difference between 6 and 7, or 10 and 11, is essentially zero.
I assume that if you’re taking 5 Junior year, you’ll be well over the “that’s plenty” hurdle at even the top schools. Dropping from APUSH to Honors is exactly what my older daughter did and she just graduated from a T10 engineering school, so it worked out fine. I suspect it will for you too.
And fwiw, my younger D22 passed on AP Lit this year, so she’ll end up with 12 instead of 13 APs. I have zero concern over it.
My daughter went to a very competitive suburban high school where many students took a large number of AP classes. She had one friend who never took a single AP class at all.
Do you want to guess which friend got a good job right after graduating university? Of course it was the friend who had a very marketable major at a good university (but not super highly ranked). It was the friend who had no AP classes at all.
6 AP classes are a LOT. I agree that a AP History class is tough with a lot of reading (although I am more easily recalling one daughter’s struggle with AP Euro History). I would be inclined to drop back to honors US History.
I also agree strongly that you should take the classes that are right for you. Then find a university that fits what you want to do and that fits what you have done and that fits your budget.