I am a Junior in high school taking Pre-Calculus and am taking AP Calculus AB senior year, will this affect my STEM college admission?

Applying to College
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So the highest math level you can go to at my school is AP Calc BC senior year, but unfortunately I’m at a lower level. A summer course is plausible but it costs way too much, and I wanted to know if it was really something colleges take a look at it.

For context I’m an honor roll student with a 4.0 GPA; i have straight As freshmen and sophomore year so far. My junior and senior years will be rigorous, I took AP Comp Sci A sophomore year, AP Stat I’m taking junior year, and I’m planning to self study for AP Comp Sci Principles.

I’m looking to apply Comp Sci major or maybe Data Sci major, at colleges such as GTech, Purdue, UMD, UIUC, UT Austin, UMich, etc. But I’m a bit worried that my math level of all things can be a breaking point, is that something to be concerned about when applying to top comp sci colleges?

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It makes no sense to take Principles if you already took CS A. It’s like taking Physics C then self studying for Physics 1. Colleges don’t care about # of APs anyway, they just want you take the hardest classes already available to you.

AB Calc will not keep you out. It’s fine. Worry about taking rigorous classes across all 5 core areas instead.

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What are you taking? If it’s AB, it’s no issue at all.

You’ll need a great test score to go with the GPA.

Good luck.

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I’m a high school senior myself, so take my perspective with a grain of salt, but if your school requires you to take AB calc before taking BC calc(that’s what you’re saying, right?), taking AB shouldn’t negatively affect you. Colleges always look at your transcript in the context of what your school offers and what you were able to take.

Don’t self-study for AP CS Principles. Don’t do it. It’s a pretty easy class/exam, and since you’ve already taken AP CS A it would just be a waste of your time.

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Self-study AP CS principles or a college CS course that inspired it (e.g. https://cs10.org ) out of interest (you probably want to skip any programming stuff that you already know from CS A), not for its AP credit, which is not generally very useful in terms of subject credit or advanced placement, especially if you already have AP credit for CS A. AP CS principles is more of a broad overview of the subject, and is not a subset of CS A, although it is generally considered less difficult than CS A.

AP calculus AB in high school is fine for applying to any major in any US university as a frosh.

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