Our district doesn’t allow AP sciences before junior year so no AP sciences yet but kid is planning to take Chemistry, Bio and Physics and of course Cal AB & BC.
Then the question comes back to whether the student is interested in continuing study of French to a high level of fluency or literacy versus interest in environmental science. Of course, it is not an irrevocable decision either way, since the student could take a semester college course to cover the material later.
So, is this student a future junior currently a sophomore enrolled in ap french?
Wrt ranking: as long as the student is in the top 10%, colleges don’t care.
If a Texas resident, the automatic admission threshold for UT Austin is higher than top 10%.
Also, it is likely that super-selective schools that consider class rank do see top 10%, top 1%, and top 1 as different.
I don’t think that the super-selective colleges necessarily care about rank, but with a few exceptions (athletes going to Stanford for example) no one has gotten into one from our high school who is not in the top 2 or 3%. The top 10% all get into fine colleges, just not the single digit acceptance rate ones. Our house never made decisions based on what it might do to rank - and I don’t think it hurt my kids. Their schedules were plenty rigorous. Our school didn’t rank honors and AP differently which did make these sort of decisions unnecessary.
For super selective schools, it only matters if the school is lower-performing.
But at highly-performing schools such as the one described above (where there’s a level of language above AP in a non-default FL) no it won’t. Ranking is done very differently depending on schools: some rank with weighted GPA others use unweighted GPA, some include all classes others don’t, some only rank based on 10th-12th, some rank only before graduation, some stop ranking at the end of junior year (in Texas for instance), some don’t rank at all. So, colleges don’t really care that much as long as the top 10% cutoff is met, and even that is “elastic” for highly performing high school where a student within top 20% will have reached a level of course rigor few students at an average school reach.
The exceptions are few:
If the student is a Texas resident, then they’d know they need to make top 8% for UT, but top 10% is good everywhere else. It’s top 9% for ELC/statewide in CA.
In short, making a decision because APES (one of the “AP-lites”) carries more weight for ranking than French 5 would be short-sighted.
French 5 is NOT a “real education”. Once you have taken the first 4 levels you are refining knowledge and the time/benefit ratio likely goes down. Son’s HS combined French 4 and 5 because of the numbers of students going for the 5th year. Yes, more knowledge and presumably fluency will be gained but that fluency is not likely to be retained unless the language is used. Reading more French literature in French isn’t always a good use of a HS period. Continuing with a language one instead to major in it in college is a different matter. Then not having a solid year without the language would be detrimental to retention of it.
Much more learning in an AP environmental course. It may be an introductory average college level survey course, but likely more interesting to have new material.
Why is he considering AP Env? Because it is AP? Because he loves environmental science? Will having AP course boost GPA? Is he applying to places where that matters/is he on the edge of top 10%
I agree with @happy1: choose the better teacher.
Gaining fluency in a language trumps any AP class as a life and work skill. AP Enviro has little/no real world use and won’t impress your future boss.