<p>My theory on this is take as many APs as you can get good grades. But a student doesn’t need to stretch him/herself to take so many APs(10-12) that getting a lot of Bs and Cs is not a good idea. Google for the Vanderbilt youtube on college admission.</p>
<p>My oldest will end up having taken 6 ap classes; AP Engish Lit & AP English Language; AP Euro & AP US History; AP Statistics & AP Chemistry. In all honesty, the English & History AP classes were very enjoyable for her as she loves those subjects & she loved being in the classes with motivated kids. The math & science APs are harder for her, but she really likes the teachers & kids. </p>
<p>Emily, if your son doesn’t want you to contact the counselor, you might want to tread lightly. How does your school handle registration? The school here sends a coursebook home each year, and parents have to sign off on the class registration request. Do you have a similar process? </p>
<p>I also wouldn’t push him to take the AP class if he doesn’t want to. Is he more of a math/ science kid? AP Euro is a note taking heavy class, and they have to learn to write in a very specific way for the AP test. If it’s not what he’s interested in, he’ll have a hard time motivating himself to do the work, and you don’t want him to say “my mom made me take the class :)”</p>
<p>Well I’m currently a sophomore and I’m taking 2 APs, World History and Psychology, I know some sophomores who are taking 3. It won’t kill him to not take it, but I think he should. Yea it’s a quite a bit of work, at least at my school, but it teaches you to really manage your time and I think it shows colleges that you’re able to handle a hard courseload.</p>
<p>I think that if a kid has a genuine interest= talent in an academic area, then he/she would probably want to learn as much about it as they could and go for the AP level class. If not, then I wouldn’t push it. He won’t want to put in the time to study, his grades will suffer and he won’t do well on the exam. </p>
<p>We have many kids taking AP classes at our hs that have no business taking them. They are doing it for all of the wrong reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li> mom and dad are telling them to because they just KNOW they won’t get into college unless ___ APs are on that transcript,</li>
<li> mom and dad’s friends’ kids are taking them, </li>
<li> the kid feels pressured to sign up for them so they can “seem” smart or brag to their friends</li>
</ol>
<p>…you get the picture.</p>
<p>Does your son’s current teacher have any input into which level he/she feels your s would best be suited next year? At our hs, the teachers of the current subjects give recommendations as to what the placement should be for the next year in that student’s progression. My husband and I have almost always deferred to their teacher’s judgement because we feel that they have had our kid in class and can truly see whether his/her capabilities match what they will be faced with in the next year. Maybe a quick email by you or your son to see where his teacher sees him being most successful/challenged would help.</p>
<p>APs are great if taken for the right reason and in moderation. Doing well on the exam (a 4 or 5 usually) can equate to 3 hr of credits in college and test you out of some large freshman level classes. You can thus have room in your schedule for electives that you really want to take. Not a bad deal. But in the end, it is the kid who wants to do the work to get the trade off.</p>
<p>Our kids can only start taking AP in 10th grade (none they can take in 9th) and it’s APUSH. The rest of the handful of APs are for juniors and seniors. My oldest kids loved history and both took APUSH in 10th. My youngest is working on his schedule for next year (10th) and told me he doesn’t want to take APUSH sophomore year. I can respect that. He’s dyslexic and APUSH has a ton of reading and writing and this son is more “mathy” than the older two. Right now he’s an all A kid and we don’t have an honors track only “regular” classes, remedial classes and AP classes so he can take APUSH if he wanted. He’s taking a college bound curriculum but not taking APUSH in 10th grade isn’t going to change much in the grand scheme of things and he may very well take it in 11th or 12th or settle for other AP classes and never take APUSH. Junior year is the parting of the ways at our school between the high achievers so not taking APUSH won’t separate him from his current crowd of A grade kids as they are all tracking in a rigorous curriculum with or without APUSH next year. It will give him one more year to “get his chops” academically. Every school is really different so you have to make your decision in the context of your own school so your mileage may vary from what “we” can do in our school. I say know your child and let him also have input.</p>
<p>At my daughter’s high school, AP World History is taught as a combined course with honors English in the 10th grade; a big attempt is made to integrate the subject matter. The class is a lot of work, but most of the students who consider themselves strong students sign up.</p>
<p>My daughter was reluctant to sign up because she is a bit short on confidence and worried that she would not be able to do well (the same grade is awarded for both the history and the English class, so if you blow the history part, your English grade is lost, too.)</p>
<p>Fortunately, the school has an evening in the spring of 9th grade devoted to an open house with all the teachers presenting talks about the courses that are available. Students and parents are invited to sit in on short talks about the classes they are considering. Daughter sat in on both the AP World/English class and a non-AP world history class (I believe it was supposed to be honors) and was really taken aback by the different expectations, the different curricula and the different styles of the teachers. Basically, the non-AP course would have been a waste of time–“we won’t be writing any papers outside of class” and “almost all of your grade will be based on group projects” and so on. Wow, I didn’t even have to talk her into the AP class after that.</p>
<p>She took the AP World, learned to work hard and developed a real interest in history. She did not study much for the AP exam (I’m sorry to say) and was disappointed to get a 4. There is no question that in this case taking the AP version was the right choice. That doesn’t mean it will be for someone at a different school, though, or for someone with little interest in writing or reading history.</p>
<p>While my son (now a college junior) took a lot of AP courses and regretted none of them, my daughter has kept the total to 5. This year, her senior year, she dropped two AP classes the first week in favor of alternative classes that did not have AP versions, simply because she had decided the subject matter was more interesting to her and fit better with her long-term interests.</p>
<p>I have been really disappointed with the quality of the AP history classes at D’s school. They are decidedly nonrigorous and , in my opinion, are not representative of college level work. The science course she has taken (AP Physics) is extremely rigorous. Everyone I speak to from different schools talks about how much reading/writing their student has in APUSH. I rarely see my daughter do any reading and she has not had one paper to write. I think it has been a waste of time, except to show an AP on her transcript. So for a student like my daughter she has a 92 UW grade in the course, that will be weighted to a 102 for doing no work (and I mean NO work, she doesn’t study for the exams…too busy doing Physics!). Not really fair if you ask me!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>NO WAY! Not all AP classes are taught the same way even in the same subject. </p>
<p>At my D’s school APs representing a full year of college work are most certainly taught at the college pace. Most people get 5’s and the kids who get A’s find the test a joke, but the human toll is very high, and a lot of kids get poor grades despite getting a 5 on the AP, which doesn’t factor into their grade. At my nephew’s school, the courses are taught at a pace that most of the class can keep up with, but 5’s are much less common, though A’s are not. </p>
<p>You should find out which way the class is taught. If the class is taught at an intenste “above AP” pace, be careful. If the class is taught at the class’ pace, then it’s worth taking to get that “most rigorous” designation.</p>
<p>CRD:
How many weeks are there in your high school schedule? How many hours for each AP class?
My S took Intro-Bio while his classmates took AP-Bio. They used the same text. the Intro-Bio class met for 78 hours (two 13-weeks semesters, three hours each). The AP-Bio class met four times a week, for double periods (90 minutes) from Labor Day to mid-May (I’m not counting the period after the AP-exam, which came just before the college finals).
I believe that non-science AP classes met for only one period rather than two, but also four times a week rather than three (actually two hours lecture plus one hour of section at a lot of colleges). The high school year is longer than the college academic year. That’s why so many students who took AP in high school flounder a bit in college. The pace is much faster and affords less teacher support than the typical AP class.</p>
<p>While I agree with marite that, in general, AP courses do not move at the same pace as college courses, it is also the case that most college students do not take 7 classes per semester. If a kid had a heavy AP load (say, 6 at a time) plus a non-AP course or two, the total work load would probably match a freshman college load, assuming the courses are rigorously taught. Per course, though, especially those that are one year long, it is not the same pressure as a college course.</p>
<p>While my son’s classes were well taught, some of my daughter’s (different public hs in the same town) have not been well taught. Her AP Lit course is a joke; there is no weight for gpa or rank in this town, though, so she doesn’t get any “boost” from the designation.</p>
<p>Yes, I believe that most kids that take a rigorous load of high school classes, participate in band, choir, theater, sports, etc. and manage to get their homework turned in, juggle their schedule with minimal parental help is “ready for college.” I don’t think of the AP or rigorous classes as “comparable” to college classes. I like them for the simple fact that they are abit more rigorous than our normal college prep curriculum for kids that can step it up a notch. The biggest differentiator between a rigorous high school curriculum and college curriculum is the self management required in college. I encourage the kids to take them in the areas that interest them but I don’t mandate that my kids take all the APs our school offers, our school offers other classes that aren’t AP branded that align closer to their interests that get the ‘box checked’ from the guidance office for rigorous and are stated on our high school profile.</p>
<p>I used to tell my S that college would be a breeze since he would be only taking 4 courses per term instead of 6 or 7–I’m not counting PE. But it turned out not to be the case. Maybe that’s because he took advanced classes instead of the freshman introductory classes, but the pace of work did not let up. The problem sets were real problem sets, not practice exercises; humanities and social sciences classes routinely assigned over 100 pages of reading per week and weekly response papers in addition to other writing assignments.
The big difference was that S could manage his time better since assignments were handed out one week in advance rather than the day before and there was less class time.</p>
<p>At my high school, most of the AP classes are taught at a pace that equals college. I probably should have qualified my earlier statement to say that not all schools are like that. Many kids from good high schools - like mine, if I need to qualify again - find that college is easier, that the pace is the same. And since qualifiers seem to be important, here are two additional ones:</p>
<ol>
<li>Material gets harder or changes as you move up the ladder, most notably in math heavy disciplines. Harder is harder. It may mean more work but it may also mean just plain harder problems.</li>
<li>The pace at the most demanding colleges is faster, though that also varies by course and area. Most of the people who go to school go, by definition, to the average school. </li>
</ol>
<p>But the original question is the importance of AP’s for college admission and the answer to that is still grades are more important, especially if you’re comparing honors to AP. If you’re talking about specific difficult-to-get-into schools, then curriculum difficulty may become somewhat more important.</p>
<p>Our high school year would be longer than a college year if the AP exams were given in June, but they aren’t. Most AP classes meet 45 minutes a day, but all the science classes have labs every other day which means they have an extra 112 minutes each week on average. Most of our APs move at a good clip, but some like AP Gov and AP Econ cover a semester’s material over a full year. (That’s because theotically AP Gov covers NY’s Econ graduation requirements and AP Econ covers NY’s Gov requirements.)</p>
<p>The amount of work varies. Some APUSH classes require more research papers than others, though all do enough reading and exam scores are generally good. AP Euro is notorious for being paper heavy - there were “only” three papers in the fall so students could work on college applications, but there will be more now. The teacher is wonderful and my son is counting on him to get him up to speed for real college level writing. Our AP English classes (Lit and Lang) are also famous for the workload.</p>
<p>The math I did covered the number of weeks plus class time. At Harvard, the semester is 13 weeks (spring break, Christmas vacation not included); so a full year of classes would be 26 weeks. In a typical hum/socsci course, classes meet for 3 hours (and many only for 2) plus one hour section. so the total class time is either 3 or 4 hours per week.</p>
<p>In our high school, classes begin right after Labor Day. AP classes in non-lab science meet four times per week. For the sake of comparing apples and apples in the context of AP exams, I’ll consider the high school year as ending at the time of the AP exam, i.e. in the second week of May. Excluding the week-long breaks and the odd “faculty development days,” this yields a total of 33 weeks. In other words, the academic year is seven weeks longer in high school than in college. It means 28 more hours of classes in college courses that meet 3 hours a week for lectures and one hour for section. For courses that only meet twice hours +one, the difference is even greater.</p>
<p>Marite, you are confusing the amount of classroom hours spent on the subject vs. the pace, which includes intensive nightly homework. In our school AP histories (US or Euro) are about twice the workload as the honors class they replace, and AP Bio is about thee times the work load. It is the homework that determines the difficulty. Classroom hours are not any more than a regular class. My nephew did AP US History on a block schedule starting in Late January. He was not adequately prepared for the exam and still got a 4. </p>
<p>It really varies by school how they approach it.</p>
<p>*I have been really disappointed with the quality of the AP history classes at D’s school. They are decidedly nonrigorous and , in my opinion, are not representative of college level work. The science course she has taken (AP Physics) is extremely rigorous. Everyone I speak to from different schools talks about how much reading/writing their student has in APUSH. I rarely see my daughter do any reading and she has not had one paper to write. I think it has been a waste of time, except to show an AP on her transcript. So for a student like my daughter she has a 92 UW grade in the course, that will be weighted to a 102 for doing no work (and I mean NO work, she doesn’t study for the exams…too busy doing Physics!). Not really fair if you ask me! *</p>
<p>HollieSue: How do the kids in that class generally do on the AP exam? If a good majority are getting 3, 4, & 5’s, then no problem. However, if most are getting 1 and 2s (or are refusing to take the May exam), then there’s a problem.</p>
<p>CRD, I agree with you. The amount of homework for AP class is insane. College courses are a lot easier.</p>
<p>CRD:</p>
<p>What is the point of comparing AP with Honors classes? Of course AP classes are harder. The comparison was with COLLEGE classes.
Workload has little to do with difficulty. Workload has to do with time spent doing things, not the degree of their difficulty.</p>
<p>A lot of AP homework is make-work. The reason that college courses appear “easier” to some (that is NOT my S’s experience, by the way) is that college courses do not assign 40 problems per week as did the high school AP-Calc teacher. These 40 problems were not actual problems, more like repetitious exercises to ensure that students “got it.” My S zipped through Calc-BC on his own doing only 1/3 of the problems that students in the actual AP-class did. He got a 5 on the exam.
I actually compared my S’s experience in Intro-Bio at the Extension School and the AP-Bio course at his high school. The AP exam was a breeze (he got a 5 on it) compared to the Intro-Bio final. And, he spent much much less time in that Extension class than his schoolmates did. Perhaps as a result there was less homework/busywork, but by the same token there was a lot less support from the teacher.
There are of course college students who go for gut courses, just as there are students who prefer to take it easy in CP classes. But for those who like to challenge themselves, college is not easier than high school.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I believe those ARE the OP’s son’s choices. </p>
<p>How much work is required and the increase in difficulty for the AP when compared to the honors class ought to be a factor in the decision. AP classes are really worth it for the dedicated student, but could be a big mistake for those not ready and willing to undertake the challenge or those who lack interest. </p>
<p>When asked which is better, a B in an AP class or an A in an honors class, Jim Nondorf, Dean of Admissions of the University of Chicago replied “An A in an AP class”. </p>
<p>I would argue that an occasional B in an AP class wouldn’t hurt an otherwise A student, but an A in an honors class would tremendously help an otherwise B student.</p>