How important is course rigor to admissions?

I am picking classes next week and need to decide on what to take. My school does not offer a bunch of AP classes but they do have them for the core classes(Chem, history…). How much emphasis is put on course rigor. For example, will it make a huge difference if I take honors calc over AP. Any info would be appreciated…thanks.

This is guesswork on my part.

If you are applying for engineering, AP Calc will almost certainly be viewed favorably.

Otherwise, I think OSU tends to focus on class rank and ACT/SAT, and may not care too much for no. of AP classes …

I’m an OSU student who got admitted last year! I would say that as long as your transcript shows that you overall showed interest in your school’s accelerated curriculum by being in a majority of honors and AP’s, you should be good to go in terms of course rigor.

@osuprof @123365 do you think 12 honors/ap classes over four years is good?

@pitt2021

I have no way of answering that question. But my observation is that admission decisions are quite consistent with one’s class rank and ACT/SAT scores, which seems to imply that other factors do not seem to matter much (other factors that do matter are minority status, Pell grant awardees, first generation student, and possibly being out-of-state).

Yes, that’s a decent amount of honors/ap courses for the course rigor component