<p>I am attending Northern Arizona University in the Fall and am enrolled in the honors program. However, they strongly advise against taking more than eight credits of honors classes per semester. How much more rigorous are honors college courses than AP courses in high school?</p>
<p>Well, all college classes are harder than AP Classes. So I would imagine if a normal class was twice as hard as AP, the Honors would be triple times as hard. </p>
<p>Basically, normal is harder and Honors is harder than that.</p>
<p>Honors classes are usually easier at a lot of colleges because they want to inflate the honors students GPA’s.</p>
<p>I was never personally in honors as my previous college didn’t have a program, but my bf was at his school and personally said that his honors classes were way easier than regular classes.</p>
<p>Hmm. I’ve heard a lot that college classes are most likely easier than AP’s.</p>
<p>I wanted to take some extra honors credits, but my adviser wasn’t too fond of the idea. For example, I wanted to take journalism honors, but I already have honors english and honors intro to drama in my schedule.</p>
<p>At my college, apparently the only difference between a regular class and an honors class is that the honors class requires an extra essay/research paper.</p>
<p>Does your college have some sort of add/drop period? At my college I can freely sit in on as many classes as I would like at the beginning of the semester and adjust my schedule until the end of the first week. </p>
<p>
I am curious which college you attend and how their honors program works, if you don’t mind sharing. For example, if the honors program requires that all honors students take a specific set of generic honors classes, then I would expect those classes to be pretty easy because the classes have to be accessible to students with a variety of talents. An engineer might not be interested in a hard-core literature class and a history major could not care less about calc-based physics. On the other hand, if there’s Calc 3 and Honors Calc 3, I would expect the honors section to cover more material and/or assign more challenging problems. I would not be surprised if the honors section was curved around a higher grade though because the honors kids are pretty talented as a group. I have seen the same reasoning elsewhere. Several math professors I know openly state that they curve grades in harder upper-level electives around a 3.7. They say that students have to be gifted in the field to get to these classes in the first place and it would not be fair to punish them for having talented and hard-working classmates.</p>
<p>In high school they might try to convince you that AP is just as hard as college, but it’s not.</p>
<p>I think my college has that, too. '</p>
<p>I’m getting some mixed responses–Kelliebm, what college do you go to?</p>
<p>AP is easier than college classes.</p>
<p>I go to the University of Richmond. It may be different at a public school, but here all classes are difficult, even intro classes- way more difficult than AP. But I have friends at other schools, ones easier to get into, that got 4.0’s their first semester without even breaking a sweat. It might be a different situation there. It really depends where you go. But at my school and at other LAC’s, AP is definitely easier.</p>
<p>Yeah, my school isn’t prestigious at all. I know a lot of people on this site go to prestigious schools, but mine isn’t. It’s just a small university.</p>
<p>AP courses in high school are nothing like the honors classes I have (The honors classes are MUCH harder). The honors classes are taught at graduate/Ivy league standards and normally have terrible curves. Very few people end up actually completing the honors requirements and getting latin honors.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>all AP classes are not equal. The same class taught at different high schools are not necessarily equivalent.</p></li>
<li><p>the same is true for college classes</p></li>
</ol>