@yearstogo one way I’ve heard to determine how to use your credits or not is to see if the college advisor will let your student see a test from the class. So, not sure if a student should repeat some math or science they’ve taken? Ask to see a test. Some schools also offer placement tests so you can get suggestions. I agree that the same math class taken at different colleges is not the same math class. Seems like it would be but it is not. Our S has compared experiences with his high school friends at other schools and, no doubt, his classes are harder. No curve. And the tests seems to be much harder. One small example of this is that, in his physics class, all formulas need to be memorized and there are a lot of them. His friend at Cornell is given all of the formulas. They compared quizzes on one unit and S19’s test was full of problems they never did in class. Not true for his friend’s test.
So be careful what you all wish for. Depending on the school, taking credit and moving on to the next course can be rough.
@yearstogo as for math, at Bowdoin at least, no class even counts towards the major until linear algebra. So, if a student wants to be a math major, they have to take the whole Calc series or pass out and then start on the classes for the major. Obviously, no grad school there and plenty of math class options so kids can definitely find enough classes in the dept to fulfill the major requirements.
Just giving you one example so you can see it’s different at each school. At some others on his list, his Calc and MV credits would have counted towards a math major and he would only have had something like six classes left to take to complete the major.
You can look at each school’s website for what determines the major requirements.
@homerdog Thanks for your comments. DS sat in on Linear Algebra at a respected college and really enjoyed both the class and the professor. Even though he learned quite a bit and liked the professor, the class was not difficult. His friend who he knows well and who we believe is very similar to DS in terms of math ability took Linear Algebra at Duke and told him that it was a reasonably difficult class.
Current plan is to apply to 10-12 colleges and see where he is accepted and then begin the process of determining which credits he will get at each college. He does not really like the idea of STEM credits taking the place of a free elective as he is looking forward to taking a wide range of classes.
I can see a situation of him being able to either graduate early or double major by going to instate vs going to a uni with a “higher rank” for four years. Instate would probably run at most 100k vs outofstate at 200-250k. I am not a STEM person so difficult for me to advise him. From what I have read, most STEM degrees, except CS, will probably require a graduate level degree so if this is true, arguably better to go instate then get grad degree elsewhere.
@homerdog, good question re: track record at D23’s school with the LACs on her list. Unfortunately, zero track record. This is because our local high school had too many students (close to 4000), so the county built a second high school to handle some of the student population and relieve the overcrowding at the original school. The newly built school opened in my daughter’s 8th grade year, and the first year, they didn’t allow any seniors to join as they wanted any graduates of the new school to have at least 2 years in the school before graduating. So my daughter is now a freshman at the new school, and it is only in its second year of operation and will be graduating its first class this year. Some of the kids are freshmen like my daughter…never went to the original high school in our area. Others are 10th through 12th graders who may have started at the other high school and then transferred. The schools, while drawing on the same local population, have different areas of focus and different offerings - the original school has, for example, an IB program which this one does not, so I don’t think we could presume that the track record of the original school would apply to this school.
So we’re in a bit of an uncertain zone (and, for sure, a lot of students from both schools are going to stay in state as the scholarship program for UGA and GA Tech is a big draw for many families). I’m in a similar (but different) uncertain zone with S21 because he homeschools (though he attends what is known as a hybrid school - he attends classes there 2-3 days a week and then has a ton of homework to do the rest of the week, and I am not his teacher for anything) so his process is quite different and there is certainly no Naviance to help me predict anything in his case!
@nichols51 Ok. So no track record for either of your kids. I can see why your D thinks she needs to keep up but I really think it’s not important in the way she thinks. She will have plenty of rigor even if she doesn’t take both AP Chem and Bio. No two kids are alike. No AO is going to look at two transcripts from the same high school and choose one student over the other because one student took two more AP classes. Like I said above, the process at small schools and at most private universities is holistic. It’s not like your D is taking no APs and she’s competing against kids who are taking 10 of them.
Your S21 will also be evaluated on his individual academic experience!
My D18 who at Clemson went in with 35 credits due to AP classes. That was beneficial in many ways. First it allowed her to fulfill many of her GenEd requirements. Second it gave her the flexibility to pursue a double major. Third she had sophomore status as a Freshman for the purposes of picking classes, football tickets, housing etc. Finally it will allow her finish in 3 years and save money for graduate school.
I definitely agree with the approach of just taking APs in your areas of strength/interest although I think it’s also good to take one AP English class to help get writing skills up to college level. This year S21 is taking AP Language & Composition, AP Calc AB and APUSH. He says APUSH is the hardest. So far, he hasn’t taken any honors or AP sciences but thinks after regular Physics this year he’ll take AP Physics next year. He says physics is his favorite science so far. Most of our AP Science classes require two class slots so they are hard to fit in before senior year (he’ll be done with French after this year). Doing well so far – 1st quarter report card came out last week and he has a B+ in APUSH, Comp Sci and AP Calc with As in everything else.
Getting ready for the Dec. SAT and his practice test scores are improving (he’s doing a Princeton Review class offered at his HS). I gave him the Fiske guide last week to prompt some thinking but nothing is grabbing him. I’ve encouraged him to think about where he might like to visit over Spring Break but we might not do any. Right now he want to apply to Virginia Tech (1st choice) with JMU and George Mason as back ups. We’ll go to the VT spring open house and have already done a basic tour there and he’s toured the other two. VT looks to be a match and JMU/GM safeties so might just keep it easy with those three.
Personally, I think AP classes are kind of a racket. I’m more in the camp of High School is for high school classes and college is for college classes type of person. I don’t understand all this dual enrollment especially at the HS (though my D will take one class next year because it’s the only Math available) What is this ridiculous race to adulthood? College and law school were some of the most fun years of my life - why rush through it? So you can join the workforce a year early? Not a great trade off in my opinion.
Unfortunately, my kids’ high school is all in on AP (playing the rankings game along with every other school in the country) and has very few honors classes to take after freshman and sophomore year. It’s AP or regular.
My private university back in the 90’s was similar to Bowdoin where there were so many restrictions on AP credits that most people I knew barely got any value out of them beyond random electives and registering for classes a little earlier than the next guy. And we all wanted those random electives - college is all about taking the class on Voodoo and You or whatever. I didn’t want to give those fun courses up, Though AP was not as all encompassing back in the day. I think I took four (?) in high school - didn’t use ANY of them (maybe I got some elective credit, but it didn’t seem to make any difference in my graduation rate). Two would have been in my major and so I couldn’t use them, no one could pass out of English and I did not ace the Science one and had no desire to take a “harder” science class so I retook it.
My daughter is thinking she wants to go to medical school and I’m learning that Medical Schools would rather the kids take Biology and Chemistry at the college level than pass out of it. They want to see the kids do well at a college class at an actual college and I can understand that. The classes are not the same. So meanwhile, any AP science classes outside of my D’s major (which is unknown at the moment) will likely be retaken and I get to spend $100 and she gets to study for a year encomassing test for no reason.
Sorry for the vent. I wish things were different. I wouldn’t let D take the AP World History Exam (she just took World History Honors, but some kids were recommended to take the test) and that did not go over well with the department. I actually got a phone call from D’s European History class teacher one evening after my D told him she wasn’t sure she was going to sign up for the exam. He was absolutely aghast. How could I not want her to take the exam? She ended up taking it (and World History too - a year later), but it’s a struggle to buck the trend.
Sorry for the novel - it’s a huge hot button issue for me.
@3kids2dogs I completely agree, unfortunately as you stated to stay competitive in class ranking these kids have to take these exams. I know plenty of kids don’t take them and don’t care about class rank and get into excellent colleges. My D21 is self motivated though and wants to be in that top 10% or higher.
I graduated HS in 1990, went to a local SUNY that was a 2 year program at the time and then went on to get a Bachelor degree from a local private school. I didn’t take any AP or college classes in HS, not sure if they weren’t offered or if I was just not smart enough to even know about them.
I agree with @3kids2dogs in theory, but college pricing is so out of whack from back in the day that if it’s possible to cut a semester or 2 out of undergraduate (and yes, a big if and not possible many places) it can save big money. In PA our state schools run $25K a year. If taking some AP classes for $100 can lower a year of that fee by half or eliminate it then it’s worth it. Similar to the Clemson example provided earlier in the thread.
edit-- I should add that this is very dependent on the student. Our S23 likely won’t be taking any AP classes in his high school career. While our S21 is taking 5 this year and took 3 last year.
@3kids2dogs, I am of the same mind (and our high schools sound a lot like yours). Huge push to AP and DE, not much offered in the way of honors, etc. I, like @AndreaLynn, am not even sure my high school offered APs in the 1980s! Actually, I’m pretty sure they did not. I took calculus and “Advanced Chem” (and that was as a senior…not as a sophomore) but neither class had an AP exam. I am struggling to help my kids navigate this path between playing the game because the rules and expectations are what they are vs. bucking the trend (hence the fact that one of my kids is a homeschooler, I suppose)!
Wow! I cannot imagine what would be worth $300 an hour. D21’s first scores were disappointing as well. There were some tears and all that. I’m giving her a little time to regroup but then will have to broach the subject of what she would like to do to bring her ACT up a bit. I’m trying to figure out what the best option will be. She went into the ACT cold, but had done a SAT prep course at a local college which did not help at all so we are staying away from that route again.
I agree that the whole AP thing is a bit of a racket and I think that college board has way too much power. But it is what it is, and the best-taught classes in our school (with the best teachers) are usually the AP classes.
My daughter is not really taking APs for the college credit. She’s taking APs mostly because that is what her academic/social peers are taking. Honestly, I think It’s not so much a competitive thing for her as a “comfort” thing… for every feeling of stress that she has with regard to her coursework, she has a corresponding level of comfort by being with her friends. Many of them are also in band (as she is) so there’s a built-in camaraderie. They don’t cheat, but there’s a network to contact if someone misunderstands what a teacher wants for an assignment or struggles with a math concept. There’s a friend group for those ubiquitous group projects. I’ve let her know it’s OK to take something below an AP level if she feels too stressed by it, but she says she’d feel even more stressed not having friends in the classroom.
It may be just her perception but she feels the less-academic kids can be mean or distracting in the classroom. The students in our community who don’t take APs (or honors, in classes where no AP exists) by junior year tend to be a bit rougher around the edges in terms of classroom behavior, motivation, etc. I’m not being a snob…The barre is not set terribly high for taking APs/honors. Her school is very much an average public school in a small community with high poverty rates so the students taking APs need not be especially gifted but are simply the ones who are able to focus on schoolwork.
@SammoJ My response about which APs to take was based mostly on this:
There are blog posts by admissions officers at Stanford, MIT and the like that claim that it’s not a case of “he or she with the most APs wins the admissions race.” I have also seen or heard many times that beyond 6-8 APs, diminishing returns kick in. So if the goal is a selective school, then, yes, I believe it’s best to take a good amount but not feel as though you have to take APs in all fields to check some box. And as @homerdog has mentioned, many elite schools place restrictions on how many APs they will accept or which ones.
However, if you’re looking at state schools that accept a lot of AP credit for placement or distribution requirements, that’s a different matter. Or if you need to save money by graduating in seven semesters instead of eight. Or if the HS ranks and you’re located in a state where you need a certain % to get auto admit to the state flagship, like TX.
@3kids2dogs Like you, I struggle a bit about the value of AP courses and the pressure that some students feel to load up on them. My D17’s HS did not offer APs at all and did not rank. D21’s HS does offer AP, but restricts the number until junior year. It also offers advanced courses that are weighted the same as APs but follow a different format. I like this compromise because it provides more choice. You can have the rigor but the course will not be structured according to the content of a standardized test. By the end of this year, my D21 will have taken five AP courses and will probably take three more as a senior. She will have a few more that are weighted same as AP. Between her classes and her ECs, her schedule is pretty full and I would be reluctant to have her take on any more.
I also have been thinking of APs more as the classes that my D’s friends are taking and where she will be challenged than about the college credit. I also know that I am very lucky to be able to think that way! I loved college and would hate for her to have to rush through it. Four years goes by quickly.
@mamaedefamilia, I also don’t like the idea of rushing through college unless it’s financially necessary. I just don’t think most high school AP classes are really taught at the depth of a college class (and don’t have PhD professors teaching them, though my daughter’s AP Lang class is fortunate to have such a teacher). And I think a student’s overall maturity/life experience level (no matter how smart the student) affects how deeply a subject can sink in or how complexly (is that a word, lol?) the student will synthesize it with other things in their brains. So I’m fine with daughter re-taking the same material in college.
For that reason she’s not going to take all AP tests (the school allows it) but will focus on taking the ones that matter the most to her or the ones in which she thinks she will do best. I guess if she does get APs recognized by a college, I’d rather she be given the choice to substitute a more advanced version of the AP class or a focused class (like a historical topic or period rather than a survey of world history, for example) rather than take fewer classes while in college.
@inthegarden my D23 is the same way about wanting to be in class with her friend group. She has some friends who are not in the pre-AP and AP classes for sure - bonded through similar interests - but she can be quite shy in the classroom and feels more comfortable being with that core group of friends who are in those same pre-AP and AP classes.
@mamaedefamilia yes - I’ve heard that about the number of APs beyond 6 to 8 not mattering so much (hallelujah) and about the Turning the Tide report by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and endorsed by deans at quite a number of schools (recommendation #2 of the executive summary: Awareness of Overloading on AP/IB Courses). https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b7c56e255b02c683659fe43/t/5bae62e241920257b85048e2/1538155239906/execsummary_turningthetide.pdf The struggle for us so far (as for many others, I’m guessing) is that class rank is dependent on taking those APs (and I’m guessing that also the box checked by the counselor as to whether the student took the most rigorous courseload or not could be affected…in D23’s school, that “most rigorous” box might be reserved for those doing the Capstone diploma which involves 13 APs). Sigh. That is certainly not going to drive D23 to take 13 APs…I’m hoping 7-9 is where she’ll end up.
Funny - I remember my high school started weighted averages for class rank when I was already midway through my high school career. It wasn’t done according to AP as we didn’t have those, but some classes were designated a level 5 (Calculus and Advanced Chemistry, for example) whereas regular honors level stuff was a level 4, and on-level classes a level 3 which all somehow factored into weighting. For some reason Wind Ensemble was given a level 5 (no such level 5 option for students into, say, art, instead of music), and quite a few kids suddenly joined Wind Ensemble in order to boost their ranks. I wasn’t interested and did not shift my courses to play that ranking game and therefore fell a few spots. I still ended up at what was, at the time, my dream school (as did another student from my class who did suddenly join Wind Ensemble). So I guess it’s been the same story, in a way, for a long time (though definitely more extreme now).
Meanwhile S21 is struggling with 2 APs this year - having a slow processing speed (diagnosed along with ADHD and dysgraphia) is making that APUSH workload even more overwhelming than it might otherwise be.
@inthegarden in terms of your daughter’s perception of the environment of some of the non-AP/non honors classes, we are in the thick of that in a different way. We have another daughter (not the D23 I’ve been referring to) who is on a very different path. She is internationally adopted and didn’t start speaking English until already in elementary school (and didn’t start reading until late as her language in her birth country was not a written language). So she is in the on-level classes, and it’s been a struggle with the learning (and social) environment since 6th grade…and she has joined in and become a part of the problem, unfortunately - not behaving in class the way she certainly knows she should but instead the way her peer group is behaving. She and D23 are at the same school and have the same counselor, so it’s…interesting. They are at the opposite extremes. So we have a full range of challenges at our house among our 3 kiddos, I guess.
@nichols51, that’s interesting, and I can understand that happening with your younger daughter (her desire to find a way to fit in). My daughter is also internationally adopted (Asian) but came to us as an infant so she didn’t have the language learning curve yours did. She doesn’t like to draw attention to her “differentness” and has always tried to blend in as much as possible (We live in a predominately-white, conservative area with few immigrants). She has very good social skills when in her comfort zone but is reserved and a little shy outside of it and not a risk-taker. She hasn’t been bullied much over the years but there have been isolated instances of racial bullying here and there and have all come from less-academic students. So she feels in a comfortable bubble away from this with her academic friend group who knows her for herself, and not as a minority kid. I do want to reiterate here, though that the most of the honors/AP kids in her school might easily be the “average” good students in a more competitive or middle/upper-middle-class school environment.
Sadly, there’s a big dichotomy in our community between the families with opportunity for stable employment and some post-secondary education (also including highly-skilled trades-people in this group) and those who do not. The majority have not been fortunate in the last two generations (factory jobs have left the area in droves) and there are huge social problems (poverty, disproportionate elderly population, high opiod abuse) and this has had an effect on young people and their vision of what the future could be for them. For many (including a number of the AP/honors kids) the local community college and commutable state directional will be big steps up for them.
I do feel proud of her, though, because she started volunteering at an afterschool library activity program in a low-income neighborhood a few weeks ago and she really likes it! I think the fact that the kids in the program are younger (though the oldest can be in ninth grade) gives her the bravery to get outside of her bubble. She’s had a lot of questions about “where are you REALLY from” and was able to address the kids’ curiosity with good humor.
@nichols51 I would flat out ask the guidance counselor or the office how kids get the “most rigorous” box checked. The answer will be different for each school of course. In our case, our school offers 30+ AP classes and S19 got most rigorous checked with just seven AP classes and most of the rest honors (but not all). There were other things they took into consideration - did the student get to the AP level in all five main subjects? How advanced in math were they? Were most of their other classes at the honors level? Etc.
I also think it mattered how many APs the top 10% of the kids averaged. S19 was on the low side but MANY of them only took 10 max. Just because the school offers 30 does not mean kids take all of them!
@inthegarden, I didn’t realize that your daughter was internationally adopted, too (and she sounds like a great kid)!
ohmygosh, @homerdog, thank you for that idea. I hadn’t thought that I could simply ask them how to get that box checked.
I talked to D23 today after she talked to her science teacher (who would also be her AP Chem teacher). She was told that AP Chem is considered harder at her school but that both AP Chem and AP Bio have the same workload…that Chem is heavier in math (and the teacher advised doing it when that math was fresher for you) with Bio being heavier reading (and the guidance was taking that one later when your reading skills are that much better)…overall the recommendation was take AP Chem next year. So we’re tentatively leaning that way as of now - doing AP Chem next year. D23 was a bit concerned at the thought that she’d possibly take only one AP science class, but we talked it through (and she understands that if it turns out she loves the science classes we can rethink things).
