<p>So I just chose my schedule for my upcoming senior year and I have been thrown into a world of confusion.
I committed myself to working my butt of next year and taking the hardest classes I could manage. I always hear about colleges not liking seniors that take their final year easy ect. However upon returning after course selections to hang out with my friends (most of whom are also very ambitious students) I found that most had opted out of many AP/Honors courses and chosen the "easier route". Most if not all have a 3.8+ and are aiming high for college.
My Schedule:
AP Bio - Friends are taking physics
AP Lit - Friends are taking regular lit
AP Spanish - Most are opting out of a language and have only 5 or so classes
AP Econ
Advanced Drama Honors (theater production class)- Most are taking low level elective like Multimedia
AP Comp Sci - Most are taking our school's regular level version of this class</p>
<p>My question is.. Will my schedule SIGNIFICANTLY help me in college admissions next year or am I just wasting my time with all these classes? If they do make a difference, will my friends all of whom have stellar gpas and 2100+ SAT scores as well as decent ECs be penalized in the admissions process?
Would Colleges outside of the UCs ( Georgetown USC Johns Hopkins level) recognize my schedule?</p>
<p>I was thinking the same, with AP Calc, AP Chem, AP Eng, AP Gov, and Honors foreign language. Is it REALLY worth it?</p>
<p>It certainly won’t get you into top schools, but you should keep up the rigor of your schedule senior year. Of course, you need to be able to keep up your grades as well, so if Bio isn’t your thing, take Chem, etc. But your schedule seems to have a good mix of AP core and elective classes (assuming you actually like Econ and Comp Sci).</p>
<p>I took hard classes senior year, applied ED somewhere, stupidly expected acceptance, let my grades drop, got deferred ED, panicked and tried to bring up my grades late but it was too much work because my classes were too hard, got bad grades first semester senior year (3.4), and screwed up my chances at a lot of my reach schools.</p>
<p>If you have the motivation then you’re good, but people burn out - I never expected it to happen to me, but it did.</p>
<p>Parent here, only take AP because you love/want & can handle the challenge. You will burn out otherwise and get lower grades and the small if any benefit isn’t worth it in my opinion. The majority of your HS record is set at app time as well as test scores ect so I wouldn’t overload on AP’s, take some but leave some breathing room senior year.</p>
<p>No. You’re gonna be doing a lot of college admissions related stuff. That stuff consumes time.</p>
<p>What I signed up for Senior (next) year (6 AP and 1 normal, possibly take more APs outside):
AP Statistics
AP Calc BC
AP English Lit
AP Microecon / H Government
AP Env. Sci.
AP Physics B
French 3</p>
<p>I did that because I transcript sucks, so I feel I need to make my transcript look more rigorous. So far, in all of my high school career (Freshman-Junior), I’ve taken 1 AP class and 2 Honors, although I’ve taken 10 AP tests. My GPA is terrible up until this year (Junior, 4.5 last semester). </p>
<p>So will this degree of rigor help me at all, assuming that I’m confident I can get all A’s and B’s?</p>