Hs course rigor?

hi! so i’ve been wondering, how important is having a challenging course load or a ton of ap classes for brown admissions?

i’m a junior and i have only taken 3 ap classes so far (1 sophomore year, 2 this year). next year i plan on taking 3, possibly 4. i have also taken honors courses when available. by the end of high school, I’ll have taken 6 or 7 APs out of the 12 that my school offers.

there are other people in my grade who are way ahead of me in terms of academic rigor (taking outside college or online courses, self studying ap tests, etc.), so i’m pretty worried i won’t stand out or it won’t appear as if i have challenged myself.
I have challenged myself and I worked hard for the good grades but I feel like 2 APs junior year doesn’t sound good.

basically, in the case that my extracurriculars are impressive, can i still get rejected over my lack of academic rigor?

also, can a good act score compensate for not taking a challenging course load?

sorry if this question sounds stupid and thanks for the help!

How is your GPA?

I think that to a large extent you need to take what you are comfortable taking, participate in EC’s that you care about, keep up with your work, and have some fun in high school. Don’t worry about competing with your classmates. Do what feels right to you.

My daughter (high school senior) has a friend who never took any AP class, and is on her way to an Ivy League school for next year. You might very well get into Brown or a different ivy league school with very few APs, but don’t obsess over it. There are a LOT of very good universities in the US, and there are a LOT of very successful people who never went to an Ivy League university.

I think I can speak a little bit to this. I was admitted to the class of 2021 and I come from a small high school in rural IL that offers no AP classes. I did take a few online, as well as 2 courses at my local community college.
Let’s first ask ourselves why colleges care about what AP classes you’ve taken. Well, we know AP classes are more difficult and can be better indicators of success in college. But I think most importantly they tell the admissions team that the students values learning more than the number that appears next to the GPA mark. They want students who are intellectual and motivated and ambitious. It’s better to have challenged yourself for the sake of learning than coasted for the sake of good statistics, and colleges understand this.
For me, it was the most evident because my school does not weigh GPA and that I had to dish out significant amounts of money for the classes I took (while being low income).

If you are taking difficult courses because you like learning, which is usually pretty apparent (for example I took a year long AP calc AB course as well as a semester C course, and I want to major in math. I didn’t spend my money on AP LIT classes) It’s also very relevant the context of your school when judging the difficulty of your courses. If you say in your app that you are dead-set on a major in Biology, for example, and your school offers very high level courses in Bio, and you don’t take them, it may indicate a few things. 1. You might not care about Bio as much as you indicated in your app 2. you might not be ready for the material in the advanced courses. (And the second is not as large a problem as the first)

If you’ll only take half the AP courses your school offers but have concentrated them in a subject of interest, than you’ve probably demonstrated sufficient love of academia. Even if they are scattered, you have demonstrated pursuit of rigor. Your counselor is asked in the app to comment on the rigor of your course load relative to other students, so this will be important.

In general terms, it’s better to have taken more AP classes than less, but understand why you are taking them, what the committee cares about, what you care about.

On competing with classmates: Some would argue competition in academics is positive, some would argue the opposite, but in theory any AP classes you take shouldn’t be driven by competition, rather the pursuit of education. That doesn’t change the fact that competition may influence people to take harder courses, which may make them appear to be better applicants, but it can go both ways.

Closing thread. The question has been asked a million times, and the answer doesn’t change from what other users have answered. However, the reason I’m closing is that the OP made a duplicate account to ask the question - a violation of ToS.