I wanted to pull together some “testimonials” from students that have self-studied for AP exams so that I can have a resource to show my parents what actual people think about self studying. If you have self studies for any AP exam, could you write a little bit about your experience, score, takeaways, etc? Thank you!
I doubt that your parents will be impressed with what other teenagers have to say about self studying. I will tell you, and you can share with your parents, what colleges think about it.
When I was going through the admissions process a couple of years ago, I went to an Exploring College Options event, which had reps from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Duke, and Georgetown, among others. During the Q&A, someone asked, “What do you think of applicants who self-study for additional AP’s over and above the AP classes they take?” One rep responded, “Please don’t do that. We’re not impressed by that.” The other reps all nodded.
You’re a freshman. Get through this year with a 4.0 (or damn close to it) before even thinking of broaching the subject.
Thanks for the advice. I have serious problems with boredom and usually get better grades when I am taking a lot of additional work, so I’m not really worried about workload or the suffering of other grades.
I don’t want to take the courses because it looks good for colleges; I want to take them because I would study them anyway and this way I’ll have records of that.
I’m going to agree with skieurope that self studying AP exams is just generally not worth it. There are likely better ways to spend your time, both in terms of personal development and college admissions.
I understand that you like learning, which is great. I wouldn’t use that energy on self studying AP classes, though. If you really want to spend a lot of time learning interesting and useful things outside of standard classwork, I’d recommend doing something like an olympiad (getting to USAMO or something like that is very significant for college admissions, and even if you don’t make it to the national level in an olympiad you’ll still learn a lot in the process).
Other interesting options would be doing research at a local college or joining some extracurricular. I think all of those options are likely to be more fun and rewarding in the long term than self studying AP tests (and those options will also count a lot more when it’s time for college admissions). Colleges generally don’t place any significance on self studying AP tests.
I’m a junior, and last year I self-studied AP Computer Science and AP Statistics, scoring 5 and 4 respectively. One of my friends from another school studied at least 5 AP exams (including the “easier ones” like Human Geography and Environmental Science), though I can’t remember how many.
Like the others said, there are certainly better uses of your time (extracurriculars, competitions, hobbies). I definitely would not self-study APs for the sake of improving your college application.
However, I wanted to learn the content and didn’t want to take the classes for various reasons (APCS at my school is poorly taught, and I had no room in my schedule for AP Stats). I’m also pretty good at independent learning (taught myself Latin in 8th grade and first-semester calculus last year). And finally, I regularly use the content I learned for programming and statistical analysis for science research projects.
My overall take: Do it if you want and if it’s convenient, but don’t feel obligated to, and don’t go overboard.