Help! Senior Year Scheduling Conflicts!

<p>Hello fellow CC'ers, </p>

<p>I am a rising senior from New Jersey and having serious scheduling conflicts for my senior year. I go to a large school that offers about 15-18 AP courses. However, we only really have a few sections of each class due to lack of enrollment and budget. As a result, my schedule for next year is not working out. I have a few periods available that I cannot seem to fill with any honors or AP courses. My only choices are electives such as Residential Construction and Technical Drawing (thoroughly unrelated to my major) or a no-credit Study Hall. I am intending on applying to competitive universities (Ivies, Duke, Northwestern) with a 4.0 UW GPA and 2180 SAT (1530 M + CR). </p>

<p>My question is, would a college admissions department rather see me take a completely useless elective, taken by the remedial students at my school or would they rather see me take a no-credit Study Hall.</p>

<p>Please reply,
Thank you so much.</p>

<p>Take the study hall. It will allow you to get a good chunk of your homework done during school. You can also use the time to work on college applications.</p>

<p>Thank you for your reply! I really do want to take the Study Hall, but I have heard that colleges look down on taking Study Halls senior year because it looks “lazy”</p>

<p>Don’t worry about taking a study hall if you have challenging courses in your schedule…everyone at my school automatically is given a study hall and can only switch out if another course of interest still has room for additional students.</p>

<p>Have you thought about taking an online class during study hall? Maybe look into Stanford EPGY or self study for an AP exam.</p>

<p>There is a post by Cal Newport (of Study Hacks) in which he discusses the advantages in dropping a useless class for a study hall. Basically, given that your study hall adds nothing to your course schedule (academically or difficulty wise) there is no net increase in usefulness to taking a useless elective. However, there is a net decrease in productivity, as you will have to actually spend time at home on the class. If you remove this useless class, you will increase your net productivity by giving yourself time to get other important work done at school rather than at home.</p>