Is there a number of AP courses that colleges look for during admissions? Thanks.
No one answer for all colleges, but generally no, there is no AP quota, formal or informal. However, they do look for “course rigor” so if your school offers AP’s in the core academic subjects and you don’t take most of them, they would potentially see that as either not qualifying for or avoiding the most challenging academic opportunities available to you. This isn’t an absolute, so if you do them in most core subjects available to you but not in all, that’s fine, especially for elective sciences, etc. where there are a lot of other options usually.
If you don’t live in California but want to apply to the UCs, I would note that based on the way the UC’s calculate GPA uniquely of everyone else, you will either need to take a lot of AP’s or take a lot of local college dual enrollment courses to be competitive at many of the UCs. They will not count any courses other than AP, DE or IB in weighted GPA. So none of an OOS students "honors,’ “advanced,” "accelerated,’ “high honors,” etc. classes get a weight.
It really depends on what your high school offers and what colleges you are talking about. If your high school doesn’t have APs, colleges won’t expect any. If your high school offers a lot, selective colleges will expect you to take as many as you can. And some colleges don’t care about APs at all. There is no one answer to this question.
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Thanks for the info.
It varies a lot.
Let’s take UGA as an example. Here’s their admitted student data for class of 2023:
UGA Calculated Grade Point Average mid-range/average : 4.06 – 4.33, with a 4.19 average
AP/IB/Dual Enrollment course mid-range/average: 8-13 courses, average of 10+
You can see that for UGA AP/IB/DE classes are important.
At colleges where “rigor” is important, they want to see the student choose the harder or more advanced options and do well in them. The harder or more advanced options may be AP, IB, college, or other types of courses, depending on the high school.
But also, do not assume that all AP courses are more important than all non-AP courses. Choosing AP environmental science, AP human geography, and AP statistics to the exclusion of physics, foreign language level 3+, or precalculus may not look good to some colleges.
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