I’m planning on applying to t20’s and some upper-midrange schools. My school doesn’t let freshies take APs, so all of my APs were from sophomore up. I took AP World and CSP sophomore, AP Physics 1 junior (could have only taken APUSH or AP lang extra this year, and after my experience with AP world I was not gonna do that), and am taking Calc BC now (I also didn’t see a reason in taking an ap course in a subject I wasn’t interested in, which I’m kinda regretting now). I was planning on taking more APs this year but the NYC DOE cut the budget way down so my school just didn’t have seats for a lot of those classes. I didn’t think this was a problem since I also took 3 PLTW courses which are intro engineering type courses and two robotics courses. The PLTW courses are weighted like APs and I got college credit for them too from RIT since I passed their end of year exams. The robotics courses are not weighted, but they were pretty hard too (IMO at least we mainly did Arduino and LABVIEW stuff with some work in Autodesk Inventor). They took up a decent chunk of my school day so I didn’t really have a lot of room to squeeze in other apps, I had a 1-10 schedule junior year for god’s sake. I really liked these courses and are the reason why I wanna go into engineering. I thought I would be fine since these were supposed to be college-level courses anyway, however, thru some googling, I found out that these classes are not viewed as the same as APs are, so now I’m thinking I’m kinda screwed. Thoughts?
Depends on the typical number of AP courses taken by a T20 admit from your school. For example, I took 16 AP courses during HS, but that was because my school offered 20 + and most T20 admits took 15-16, and we were allowed to take APs as freshmen. If your school only offered 3, however, it’s fine to take 2 or 3 of them, though T20s would like to see that you’ve challenged yourself in other ways (dual-credit, internships etc.)
Are AP courses the only way to measure the rigor of my transcript? My school offers a lot of “college-level” courses in that you can get college credit by doing them, but not all of them are AP classes, for example, the engineering courses I mentioned before.
Talk to your guidance counselor and see if your current and projected schedule is sufficient to get the “most rigorous” designation.
My kid took 5 APs of 16 offered at his school. He goes to a private T20. Didn’t seem to be an issue at all.
I do not think that this is a problem. You could ask your guidance counselor what they think.
You definitely need to think about and apply to safeties, of course.
How many AP classes are offered by your high school isn’t always a relevant metric. Our school offers around 25 AP classes, but many are in world languages or are pure electives such as AP Seminar. Plus students are limited in what they can take in the first two years. So it is perfectly normal for top performers to only take 8-10.
OP, there are other ways to show rigor and challenge, and yes, your PLTWs are part of that. However, only your guidance counselor can tell you how your level of rigor compares to what your school offers, how you compare to others in your school, and if he/she will check the box that says you took the most rigorous course load offered by your high school.