As the end of my first trimester of sophomore year
is coming to a close, I am starting to look ahead to next year’s schedule.
My freshman year schedule was:
APHG
Pre-AP Geometry
Pre-AP Algebra 2
Pre-AP Biology
Pre-AP English
Spanish 1
PE (required)
This was the most challenging schedule available to me as a freshman.
My sophomore schedule is:
APWH
Pre-AP Pre Cal
Pre-AP English
Pre-AP Physics/Space Science
Health (required)
Business 1&2 (elective, weren’t any other challenging courses I could take)
Art (required)
Spanish 2
After this year I’ll have all of my requirements out of the way, leaving for more available space for Junior and Senior year.
Here are the classes I’m looking at taking Junior year:
APUSH
AP Calc AB (school doesn’t offer BC, so I’m going to self study the remainder of the BC content; already talked about with teacher, senior year class will be AP Stat)
AP Lang
Pre-AP Chem (basically honors)
AP Bio (only if school offers it next year)
Electives (aren’t any challenging courses that I could take. I’m looking into possibly doing a self-study)
My schedule for Junior year is essentially as hard as my school offers. My school doesn’t offer anything above Spanish 2. Whether or not I’ll take AP Bio will depend on if a teacher decides to teach it. I know that, compared to many other Junior year schedules, mine seems pretty easy. However, there is no other way for me to take any harder classes. There are no challenging dual enrollment classes (the DE classes available are basic ones like Public Speaking), and no online classes available for me to take that are challenging (again, they’re easy classes that are mostly used for credit recovery). Does this seem like a fairly rigorous course load? Will I be at a disadvantage when applying to top colleges, despite that this is the most rigorous available to me?
Colleges take into account the course offerings of your school, so the expectations for someone going to a school with 20 AP courses and 3-4 AP courses is different. You should be fine as long as you balance your classes with especially strong EC’s.