I am Junior selecting my senior year classes. I plan to take ap bio, ap statistics, ap us government. Plus honors English and religion courses (I attend a Catholic high school). Glee club and science research. I can add ap music theory or psych but I don’t know which one to take. If I include ap music will I have a heavy course load? Psych is an elective but I hope to get into vassar, Wellesley, Smith or Mount Holyoke colleges. I work @15 weekly and my gpa is 3.6. If I don’t take ap music I will have only taken 3 ap courses and 6 honor classes during high school. Should I take psych and the 3 ap courses listed above? If I add ap music instead of psych would I have a heavy load senior year?
AP Music supposes you can already read music - the theory level is pretty high.
For the colleges you list, you’d need to have reached level 4 in a foreign language-have you? If not, since it’s a core class, it should replace either ap psych or ap music.
One daughter took AP music theory. It is a tough course. She was both an exceptionally talented musician and also a very strong student with very strong math abilities. She also read music very well, could sight sing to some extent, and was a strong piano and guitar player before she started AP music theory. She still had to work very hard in AP music theory.
You also need to remember that the entire “college application” process is pretty much the equivalent of another extra AP class over your senior year. You will be deciding which schools to apply to, visiting schools, filling out applications, writing essays, getting teachers to send in references, preparing for the SAT or ACT, getting acceptances, and likely visiting schools again after getting acceptances to decide which university to attend. This is a big sink of time and effort.
Working is also a sink of time and effort.
Vassar and Wellesley are going to be reaches anyway, regardless of how many APs you take.
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if you already do music and know how to read treble/bass, know basic theory (chord types, etc) it’s really not too bad. But then again my ap music theory teacher was pretty incompetent and we did chord progressions ALL YEAR. Ask former music theory students, maybe, to get an idea of how hard your class is?
If you’re doing normal Psych it’s pretty easy.