I am sorry if I was rude to any of you guys earlier because that is how it may have came off.
Ok, does taking 9 AP’s vs taking 10 AP’s really matter in the college admission if they took that AP course out of school at a learning center.
Do colleges only care about AP courses because of the way it makes your academic workload look hard?
Taking more than 6-8 APs will make little, if any, difference in admissions. It’s not an arms race where the one with the most APs wins. While there may be valid reasons for taking more than 6-8 APs, including intellectual curiosity, impressing admissions is not one of them.
In addition to course rigor, top colleges also look at grades, SAT/ACT scores, essays, recs, and ECs. They are all important, and there is almost never a case where all other things are equal other than 10 APs versus 9. As a freshman, it’s too early to worry about number of APs.
Looking at your past threads, while many of your classmates are taking AP Bio as freshman, relatively few students take this class as a freshman. And for good reason - it’s a hard college-level course. Colleges give no brownie points to applicants who take AP Bio as a freshman.
Also, it’s important to note that taking an AP and getting bad grades is not beneficial at all. So you really need to weigh many factors in your course selection decision.
No, it doesn’t matter hardly at all. Take the APs in the areas you are interested in. Get good grades. Study for your standardized tests and do your best. And focus on a few ECs you really like. College will take care of itself if you do those things. Too many APs can just distract you from being a 3D genuine interesting person, which is what colleges want the most.
Thank you both for your very detailed responses.
It depends on whether that AP Class serves a purpose. Generally, no.
Absolutely not. Many people do AP Env Sci, AP Human Geo, AP Seminar just to get those AP’s in. Colleges care about your math, hard sciences, english much more.
But soemtimes if you do well on AP tests and get high enough scores on the AP tests, you can have enough credit to skip a semester, study abroad, take a lesser load, do research, etc.
Taking a few APs look good on your application, but eventually, there is a point where it doesn’t really do anything for your application anymore. If you want to take more APs to try to get more college credit and test out of gened requirements, then that’s fine, but don’t do it just because of admissions. Don’t take so many APs that you don’t have time to study for the SAT/ACT, to participate in extracurriculars, or even just enjoy high school in general.
Most of my classmates thought I was comparatively weak for taking 5 AP classes (most of which were senior year) and 1.5 fine arts credits every year, but it clearly worked out for me. APs only matter in two contexts:
- If a required class has two or three "difficulty levels", it looks good to take the highest one (e.g. AP European History over regular world history, AP US History over modern US history)
- "Maxing out" on the field that you want to study (e.g. taking AP Chemistry and AP Environmental Science for going into behavioral neuroscience; my school didn't have AP Bio)
I know two kids in my high school who took both AP Chemistry and AP Physics as juniors for the sole purpose of maximizing the number of APs they took. They were both economics majors and to my knowledge never took either AP econ exams, or a business class. They just ended up stressing themselves out with the workload and having no time for ECs or, y’know, sleep.