I want to get into Pomona college. Right now my school only offers Ib Bio and AP chem as the highest science classes. I have already taken Bio honors. I love biology and dislike chem but I dont know which will look better for college. please help ASAP
Have you taken all three of biology, chemistry, and physics (not necessarily AP or IB)?
yes i have
Whatever is more interesting to you.
Pomona’s guidelines for placement into more advanced or accelerated courses are given at https://www.pomona.edu/new-students/guide/academic-life/placement-and-advisory-exams . It does not look like AP or IB credit will automatically give advanced placement in chemistry (or biology); for chemistry, students take Pomona’s placement test.
However, for other colleges, it is unlikely that IB SL scores will give any advanced placement, while AP scores may.
Biology majors need to take general chemistry and organic chemistry for their major.
If you dislike chemistry, you will have an extremely hard time learning the material in AP Chem. If you’re not interested in it, you will have to put 2-3X extra effort into forcing your self to learn it. And forget about getting a 3+ on the AP exam if you do not like chem. In our school, we had an amazing chemistry teacher and really smart students in class (most of them who put time studying outside of class), yet only 1 person got a 4 and 1 person got a 5 on the AP exam. The rest were a few 3s and mostly 2s.
And yet at our high school 60 percent get a 4 or 5 on AP chem. One trend I have noticed at other schools is not requiring Chem Honors first but letting kids go straight in to AP.