@mathyone: what do you mean “admissions officers in capital letters”?
The thread is about taking APs to impress (presumably, adcoms. Or other high schoolers?) So, this isn’t about assuming, it’s about the thread’s topic.
On the other hand, I’m assuming the students at your school take AP core classes junior and senior year, not freshman and sophomore year, then stop to take other APs, which is the situation I was discussing (the issue of kids being pushed to take a class over the summer, especially in math, in order to skip ahead, is real, and I am unapologetic in saying that this is not healthy for 11 to 15 year olds. I know your son was highly talented in math, so it’d have been fun for him - but many kids are just “pushed” - there can’t suddenly be entire cohorts of highly gifted kids who need to spend their summers doing math “for fun”. It becomes absurd when the kid is so pushed that he exhausts a school’s offerings in the subject then stops taking it altogether because of the belief in “collecting the most AP’s”. Instead of spending summers learning Algebra and precalculus, the kid would have been better off enjoying summer, going to summer camp, staying with grandparents, playing with friends at the pool or the lake… and taking the class when scheduled on the advanced path, culminating in CalcBC junior or senior year.)
I agree that when the choice is AP or regular, AP is a better choice, as “endure” often is the right word for “regular” classes at many schools. AP is important because its standardized curriculum ensures a high level regardless of the school where it’s taught.
So, in your district, with only two levels, AP takes the place of Honors& AP elsewhere; my only concern is that taking all your core classes as AP would be exhausting even for very strong students as it’d be 5 AP’s per year both junior and senior year.
In any case, taking 12 Ap’s should never be considered normal or necessary; “impressing others” shouldn’t be a criterion in choosing a class.
I agree with you, ease of taking a college class depends on the college’s schedule and the high school’s flexibility (ie., possibility to take evening or late-afternoon classes, ease of getting early release, EC situation). But your daughter did exactly what I was talking about: she tried. It didn’t work out, but she thought in terms of curricular interests and subject matter. She showed genuine interest for the subject.
In the case of your younger daughter: of course taking psychology makes sense. That’s exactly what I was talking about: taking classes that are “logical” or consistent with purported interests, not because high school students think adcoms think they’ll be “impressive”. (Unless your high school considers she’s not done with math with Calc BC, I wouldn’t have her take AP Stats. She’d be better off waiting till college to take a calc-based statistics class.) Taking AP Psych when you have no interest in psychology just because there’s the accronym AP in front of it… is un-necessary and can be counterproductive.
@spurs2014: what AP’s, in what sequence?