Again, it depends upon the school. At our local public school, it would be hard for a student on the “most rigorous” track to end up with less than six APs unless explicitly trying to avoid them. Eight is common.
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Same is true of my kid’s competitive, public high school in NJ. We send only a handful to Ivies each year, and since there are so few, everyone knows who they are and what classes they were in. School does not offer many of the minor AP’s. So there’s pretty much a standard set of Honors/AP’s in junior year that are perceived as a “must have” for aiming for the Ivies. It seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for admission, at least for our school.
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Since your school admits a lot of students 15-20 each year, odds are they are the top students in their class.You need to be as well.
AP’s How many does your school offer and how many are you taking?
Top students does your course rigor match theirs.
If your school is sending that many students regularly to Ivys your guidance counselor knows what it takes to get accepted. Talk to them regularly about your chances, you are just starting your sophomore year lots of time still
You probably will have a much clearer picture where you stand than most people due to the amount of students your school sends to Ivys
Elite schools want to see you have taken the most rigorous course load available at your school. There’s no set number. You should check with your counselor what constitutes “most rigorous” at your school.
If it’s a course load you don’t think you can be successful taking, you might want to rethink your objectives. There’s lots of options and don’t forget to be happy, have fun, and focus on things that are important to you personally.
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Unless you are in every top schools admissions committee, you can’t say I am wrong. You’re entitled to your opinion, too.
This part gets confusing…the honors/ap/dual enrollment classes. At my kids’ high school they have some honors classes, such as honors chem and honors world history that get the grade bump and the kids can take the AP exam. Do schools other than the UC’s look at these classes as AP classes, and/or same level as AP or no? I have always assumed that AP/approved honors/dual enrollment are looked at equally in the eyes of admissions. I know they did for the UC’s, but don’t understand if other universities do or do not? Thanks.
Depends on the HS, and what they say in the school profile. If they say that honors chem/WH Is at AP level, then colleges will take them at their word. In the absence of such a statement, no, probably not.
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i do not think so.
Traditional Honors course do not get the same weight as AP,s
From UC’s website
Honors courses are Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate Higher Level (IB HL) and designated Standard Level (IB SL) courses, UC-transferable college courses and UC-certified honors courses that appear on your school’s course list.
Looks like they have Honor classes they certify as rigorous enough and give credit but not all honor classes
OOS state no Honor classes count
If your school offers 12-15 AP’s and you take about half 6-8 it can effect your rigor in GC report, your recalculated GPA and class rank can suffer against your peers who did the same as you but took more challenging classes.
Top schools it will matter the most. They want you to take the most rigorous classes offered and excel at them. You are competing against applicants that did
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Let’s say @skieurope was staff at what would be considered a top school worldwide.
Also, it’s well-known among professionals.
(While generally those who argue the opposite are either students or parents of HS students. I assume that’s not your case.)
You’re entitled to your opinion on the matter but we must make sure OP doesn’t engage in a fruitless arms race that is more detrimental than anything else.
6-8 APs with As suffice to indicate the student can “do the work”. Not much information is added by an extra 2 or 3 APs. The law of diminishing returns applies after 6-8 APs.
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Most challenging does NOT mean “every AP offered”.
(Unless there’s a compelling narrative to go along with it, taking 15 APs may actually be detrimental.)
Wrt gpa:
It really depends on the college you’re applying to but most highly selective colleges recalculate GPA and use an unweighted/core class version only.
(Some public universities, such as UAlabama, Indiana, Florida publics, North Carolina publics, Miami Ohio use your school’s weighted).
Class rank: most highly selective colleges want you to be in the top 10% of your class. However many schools do not rank at all. They offer another way to gage the “value” of your GPA. The exceptions are UT (weighted rank for top 6% is imperative and does lead to an arms race in some schools) and if you school is low achieving (in which case you’re expected to rank in the top 3 if not “top few in school’s history”). Exact rank is meaningless. If all top 20 from a HS apply to the same highly selective colleges, their exact rank compared to others will not be a factor in the decision.
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Our public school doesn’t offer AP till Junior year. When it says 6-8 is common, does it include senior year?
Also, how about self-study APs? Does it help?
Yes
No. There is no expectation from any US college that an applicant take an AP exam where no course is offered by the HS. And no brownie points are awarded by AOs for self studying. Rather, they want you to take the bist demanding courses you can handle and are available to you. If you have exhausted your HS curriculum, there are far better options to show academic initiative than cramming for a 3 hour exam.
There may be valid reasons for self studying, including potential college credit. But not for admissions, generally.
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Our school weighs honors the same as AP’s, but everyone knows AP’s in general are more rigorous. My daughter’s took 9/7 AP’s, the rest mostly honors and were 8/11 in their classes, a few higher up, including one daughter’s friend (who was salutatorian), only took honors.
Of course, any “weighting for rigor” can have issues. For example, is AP human geography more or less rigorous than precalculus, physics, or foreign language level 3 or 4? Does a high school that gives more weight for AP courses really want to encourage students who complete algebra 2 to choose AP statistics instead of precalculus?
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Exactly. Only some honors classes get the grade bump and are considered ap level in the eyes of the UC’s. For example, honors freshman and sophomore english are not given the extra weight I think it all goes back to rigor, taking the hardest classes the high school has to offer for the more competitive schools.
I agree it seems to be rigor relative to your school as a highly important factor. Typically about a handful of kids take what counselors at our test -in private school deem the hardest 3 APs; yet those kids usually take 6-7 total APs just like the majority of the top 20% and many below that . The ones with the rigor do far better in admissions every year, even those outside the top 20. Rigor relative to peers/offerings matters.
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Based on my S21/D23 school. A Suburban Public high school in Florida that offers Cambridge (AICE), AP Capstone Tracks and Dual enrollment classes on campus many of the top students have 10-15 of those classes by Graduation. This year Valedictorian went to Occidental,Co-Salutatorians Stanford and UF Honors. Last couple years Valedictorians went to MIT and UF Honors.
S21 ended up with 7 AP’s
D23 (Cambridge Track) 9th grade 1 AP 2 AICE 10th grade 1 AP 3 AICE 11th grade 1 DE 2 AICE 1 AP
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These aren’t that hard to distinguish, especially for an adcom from Cornell or Dartmouth. ES, Psych, Geo are all considered fluff APs and would be discarded, Stats without Calc would also be discarded. So the third applicant is pretty much out, at least wrt who has the best rigor. Stats over Calc would be a serious red flag for these colleges, so the second applicant has the strongest rigor, and that’s not that hard to tell.
And people posted the MIT blog, there would be no doubt who MIT would select, that would be the one who has Calculus, AP sciences and AP in humanities. They rarely get candidates who don’t have Calculus anyway, doubtful applicants 1 or 3 apply there. I think it would a little more difficult if the first candidate had Calc over Stats.
"Even if you get a 5 in AP Calc, for example, I would absolutely take Calc 101. "
That’s really not good advice, first off if you can use AP credits to graduate earlier as with many public universities, you could save time and money by taking other courses to fulfill grad requirements. And at ivies, without even getting into MIT, Stanford, Berkeley et al., I know kids that didn’t want to be bored with Calc again, so took the next class in the math sequence or another class to fulfill their quantitative requirement.
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