<p>It is given to those who took at least 8 AP Tests and got an average of 4 or above. </p>
<p>I took 9, and very tough ones: Cal BC, English, Chem, Bio, Phy, US history European History, and others. </p>
<p>How good of an award is this for MIT, Harvard, Yale, etc?</p>
<p>Thanks all!!1</p>
<p>It is definitely not a shoo-in for MIT. I know a student–very well–who was a national AP scholar by 11th grade (more than 8 classes), all of the AP courses were the tough ones, including Calc BC, all were scores of 5, and that student was not accepted at MIT. (SATs were extremely high also.)</p>
<p>I think a good AP record actually is more helpful at the next level down in selectivity, and I’m fairly certain it can be a favorable factor in earning a merit scholarship.</p>
<p>It says you worked hard. That’s a good thing. I’ve had children who were AP Nat’l Scholars, and they didn’t get in everywhere they applied.</p>
<p>midmo, maybe your student was a bad essay writer, or had no leadership, or was Asian…
AP National Scholar seems like a pretty strong award.</p>
<p>It probably holds some weight but definitely not as much as the other types of competitions such as ISEF, Intel, Siemens, Olympiads, etc.</p>
<p>National AP Scholar isn’t really that important.</p>
<p>its definitely good to ahve but it holds no importance by itself - but when you throw it in with national merit winner, amazing ECs and strong SAT’s then it will only make you look that much better</p>
<p>As an ‘award’ it’s not particularly important, per se, but colleges LOVE to see many AP classes and 4,5 scores on your application.</p>
<p>How many people got it this year? Does anyone know?</p>
<p>About 600 juniors got it this year</p>
<p>Now, that means, in a pool of applicants, the commonality of this is say, about twice as that of siemens semi-finalist, and far less common that national merit scholar.</p>
<p>Its’ qutie good, but, as people mentioned, its a supplmental goody rather than a driving force. You won’t get accepted for it, but it will certianly help paint a better picture of you and demonstrate your academic prowess</p>
<p>^^I think you mean national merit finalist. National merit finalist does not equal national merit scholar.</p>
<p>Anyway, there may be less AP national scholars (600) than National Merit Scholars (2500) but that doesn’t mean it is more prestigious. Many people don’t even take 8 AP exams. I know I didn’t. For MIT and CalTech, they pretty much expect that you will be able to get a 5 on the math and science ones. Most people in the freshman class at MIT when I was there AP’d out of chemistry and calculus and at least one other science subject. At MIT, you needed a 5 on the AP test to place out of a class (they have since made you take an additional Advanced Standing Exam.) So even if you got 3’s on the remaining AP’s, the vast majority of the MIT class would have easily averaged 4 over 8 AP’s.</p>
<p>So it’s definitely not a hook at MIT or Caltech.</p>
<p>However, getting 5’s on the math and science AP exams does show that you got what you were supposed to out of your math and science classes. For the humanities AP exams, doing well shows that you are good at the humanities. It’s sort of like getting a high verbal score or writing on the SAT.</p>
<p>Keshira, the OP asked about particular schools. For most schools, a great AP record is helpful, but I think for those mentioned in the OP, it is not very important. The student mentioned writes very well–won a national writing award–and has extensive leadership experience. (That doesn’t mean the student wrote the kind of essay that MIT wanted to see, I admit.)</p>
<p>Take a look at MIT’s various blogs; I don’t think you will find any evidence they value a strong AP record. There is a regular poster on cc who is a recent MIT grad who has stated (s)he got a 2 on the Calc BC exam.</p>
<p>^^For all you know she could have taken it her senior year and MIT wouldn’t have seen it. She also got straight B’s in math, but I don’t think it is accurate to say that MIT doesn’t value grades either (although who knows).</p>
<p>Just my opinion, but it seems that the MIT bloggers tend to be the exceptions with lower stats. Perhaps they are chosen this way because it encourages more people to apply…or so that people know that it is possible to get to MIT without a perfect record. However, I think it’s kind of misleading. Reading the blogs, it seems like no one has straight A’s or high SAT scores at MIT. And whenever people reveal their grades and scores it seems like they are below the 25%-75% ranges listed for MIT in US News.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about their semifinalist Siemens project or how they went to USAMO and MIT has a whole bunch of those. Perhaps they just didn’t mention it because it is high school, but it seems that the other bloggers have talked about their high school experiences.</p>
<p>^^^I was referring to statements made by the adcom members, not the student bloggers.</p>
<p>It seems a lot of the people on the MIT board were also student bloggers (including the person you mentioned.) That’s why I said that.</p>
<p>Zipper, your question can only be answered if it’s rephrased. In other words, the important question is not how good an award it is from the college viewpoint, but does it help validate the rigor of curriculum at your particular high school. This can be very important in some circumstances, such as an unknown high school that sends very few students to extremely selective colleges or homeschooled students who have to go the extra mile to prove they are academically qualified. A good example was a CC poster from an unknown school who was the only National AP Scholar from his/her entire state. A student who goes to a competitive high school with a well-known demanding curriculum that routinely sends students to top tier colleges will not be set apart in the same way. So the answer is different depending on your high school circumstances and is based not so much on the college you’re applying to, but where you’re applying from.</p>
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<p>Nice to know that people read and remember my posts, I guess.</p>
<p>I tend to emphasize the less glowing parts of my high school record when I talk to prefrosh, because they tend to be freaking out unproductively and thinking that minor blemishes will torpedo their applications. I want to show them that this isn’t necessarily true. I think most of the past and current bloggers feel the same way. We also worry, or at least I do, that students who are used to obsessing over perfection will then get to MIT and be mentally and emotionally destroyed when they start to struggle, because we’ve seen it happen to tons of people, so we’re trying to preempt that and get them used to thinking that an occasional screw-up is not the end of the world.</p>
<p>Yes, I got a 2 on the Calc BC exam, and yes, I got straight Bs in high school math other than in AP statistics. And yes, MIT saw that BC score, because I took it as a junior. I also got 800s on both the SAT I math and the SAT II math IIC. I was an AP National Scholar as a junior, and I was a back-to-back AP State Scholar (which I would argue is more prestigious than National, oddly, because there are only 100 in the country each year, one boy and one girl from each state) junior and senior year. I had numerous state-level Science Olympiad medals and was a member (and in the former case, captain) of nationally competitive Science Bowl and Quiz Bowl teams. I had two ISEF projects that won regional awards. My bio teacher, who wrote one of my recommendations for MIT, thought that I was one of the brightest students that he’d had in his teaching career (at a magnet whose great strength is the sciences and scientific research), and that the only reason my first ISEF project hadn’t gone to Internationals and won an award there was that I’d been robbed by the regional-level judges.</p>
<p>But you know, people EXPECT to see all that good stuff. I’ll happily tell prefrosh about it if I’m trying to give them a case study using myself as an example, but usually I’m trying to reassure them that one B or a non-5 on an AP test will not destroy their chances.</p>
<p>To get back to the point, being a National AP Scholar was a nice thing to list, but I don’t think it helped my applications much. I think that the rigor of my schedule (which was achieved largely, though not entirely, by taking lots of AP classes), coming from a state not known for such, helped me a lot. I think that the fact that I was willing to take the risk of getting a lower grade in order to learn more helped me with some schools, and definitely with MIT. I think the State Scholar awards actually helped me more because you get them for being tops in your state, not just for taking a bunch of tests. They show something about how you did in the context of your environment, and not many get them.</p>
<p>I banked a lot on APs, because they were a mechanism by which I showed where my educational priorities were and how important it was to me to be challenged academically. And how I’d done in the context of the state I’m from. And that I wasn’t afraid to take a chance, and that I was resilient enough to not collapse or kill myself at the first bad grade. Other applicants have other ways of showing this, but for me, APs were a major part of it.</p>
<p>Also, for the record, nobody took my high school stats into account when I was hired as a blogger. Nobody asked what they were. The major criteria for being hired as an MIT student blogger are being able and willing to write well about your own experiences, and contributing to the diversity of the blogging team (e.g. they want students of different genders, races, and backgrounds, students from different living groups, students in different majors, students who participate in a wide range of campus activities, students with a variety of writing styles, and so on).</p>
<p>Thanks all. </p>
<p>Also got Siemens Semifinalist two year, and take/took 6 university courses, so does make me a lot more likely to get in?</p>
<p>Also, my school usually sends about 1-2 kids to MIT each year, and a few to yale, Stanford, etc.</p>
<p>If I had two students: one an AP National Scholar by the end of his Junior year, the other number 1 is his class at the time of application and i knew absolutely nothing else about the candidates or their HS’s, I’d take the AP Scholar over number 1 in a heart beat. While the situation is generally not this extreme, I’d guess that the award would be quite valuable to a student who came from an HS that was unknown or little known to the adcom.</p>
<p>I thought AP National Scholar wasn’t an average of 4, but 8 scores where EACH IS AT LEAST 4. Correct me if I’m wrong.</p>