Something I’ve always been wondering is the possibility of students who have taken no honor or AP classes getting into UCs or other prestigious schools. Is that even possible? :-/
Does your school offer them? If you have access, but have not been taking advantage of your opportunities, that doesn’t look good. If your school doesn’t offer them, you won’t be penalized for not taking classes you couldn’t access.
No I do take IB/AP and honors classes i just wanted to know if something like that happened to students
Well, there’s usually a direct correlation between course rigor and class rank, so if someone fails to take a rigorous schedule, it’ll be reflected in their class rank, weighted GPA, or recalculated GPA (like what the UCs do). And most top colleges rarely admit students who aren’t in the top 10-20%, the range that usually contains the students that take honors/AP courses.
Without getting into the specifics, obviously there are always outliers that still get admitted for various reasons, but at a much lower rate than the typical applicant.
Don’t get hung up on labels. Some schools have extremely rigorous coursework that produce extremely competitive applicants to very selective schools w/o titling their offerings as AP, Honors or IB. But they also are prepared to explain this to colleges their kids apply to as well.
Your real question is: do kids who don’t challenge themselves with rigorous coursework in HS get admitted to very selective schools? Unless they’re an uber athlete, the answer is a resounding NO
I know a few students at MIT who didn’t take a single AP (probably due to a simple reason such as, the HS doesn’t offer AP’s).
For me and my HS at least, the word “honors” in front of a course name was meaningless.
Others have pointed out that it depends on the school. Every college I visited explicitly stated that they consider curricular rigor above all else. They want students who took the “most demanding available” courseload. Now, I’m sure that some outstanding football and basketball players have gotten into top-ranked universities without great high school transcripts, but that’s a separate matter.