From a practical standpoint, do they add up how many Honors and AP and assign the student a number? Then, does that usually pertain to the particular school or across all students?
Anyone familiar with the process?
They rely on the GC’s assessment of how rigorous your class schedule was in comparison to your school.
As @“Erin’s Dad” said, the Secondary School Report contains a section which asks:
Each HS defines rigor using its own parameters; there is no set rubric.
To be a bit more specific than Erin’s Dad was, it’s rigor is defined by both the level of coursework that is available at your school and by your schedule compared to the other students in your class. So you can have a ‘most demanding’ schedule at a school with no AP classes, if you took the hardest schedule available to you. AND you can still get ‘most demanding’ if you were to take say 4 AP classes if the norm at your school is to take only 1 or 2. Or you can get only a ‘demanding’ if you took the same 4 AP classes, but attend a school where everyone else takes 6-8.
So, it’s school specific.
So the colleges simply rely on GC? Huh. I would have thought they did an independent assessment.
Admission offers will look at the transcript of courses you took as well as the school profile from the HS. If there is a glaring problem, I imagine it would be noticed (ex. if the GC checks “most rigorous” for a student who took zero out of 20 APs offered by the HS). But admission officers don’t have time to independently assess each schedule taken by each student in each HS across the country (not to mention internationally).
And it’s not really fair to penalize students who have no APs in their school for that lack of availability. That would just be one more advantage to the well funded suburban school student.
Likewise, some schools limit APs to juniors and seniors and also limit the number taken in a year. There’s a big split between allowing kids to take the AP sciences with only their middle school exposure to the subjects and those that require a regular/honors class (our school does an integrated program that covers all three in two years) and also requires a teacher recommendation into the AP. GC reports for each kid and the school profile provided to colleges explain all that, so it’s not just the GC’s say so, they have to explain why. No student at my son’s school has been permitted to take more than 8 APs (although most of the sophomore Honors US History class does chose to take the APUSH exam). That would be below average for some schools. On the other hand, our honors classes seem to have a pretty good reputation for rigor so it doesn’t seem to disadvantage them at the selective institutions.
I’ve always found the wording of “most rigorous” to be a bit confusing. If Student A takes 6 AP courses by his junior year and honors everything else but Student B manages to take 7 AP courses by his junior year and honors everything else, wouldn’t Student A no longer be taking the “most rigorous” courseload? I know I am be very literal here but I am just curious where is the cut off for “most rigorous”? Is there a percentage of students at a given high school who takes the “most rigorous” courseload? And if there is, I am sure it varies from high school to high school.
You are correct. If you really want to know what it’s like at your school, ask your GC.
Remember too at least the larger schools have regional officers and you can bet they know the high schools in their region VERY well. The admissions staff actually relies on them. They will know what’s available, rigor and everything else. Sure they can look up the stats but they can dig deeper this way.