If a student takes an AP class before s/he applies for colleges, s/he should probably take the corresponding exam. Qualities of AP classes and grades are highly uneven among high schools in this country, so AP exam scores are important for those who took the classes. AP scores are also among the best indicators (better than other stats like GPAs or standardized test scores) of a student’s potential success in college, so AOs pay attention to them for applicants whose high schools offer the classes.
However, your daughter’s situation may be somewhat different since she took the AP classes online during the peak of the pandemic. Colleges are likely to overlook the missing scores in that scenario.
CADREAMIN just started a new USC Class of 2027 thread which includes some important changes in this years application timeline. You might post your questions over there as well. USC Class of 2027 — Regular & Early Action Decisions
@AnonMomof2 - No worries, it’s all in the context of the school they are in. I would also be cautious about how you position it to your younger son. If the typical outcome at the school is that the majority of the students get a 2/3 then it may be unrealistic for him to get a 4/5. That’s not a reflection of his ability more that the class isn’t covering everything they need for the full AP class.
At my sons school, you can’t take AP classes prior to junior year, they all have prerequisites and minimum GPA requirements and the some require the students to take seminar in the spring.
So for History, the sequence would be HWorld History, HPre-APUSH, APUSH & APUSH seminar. So by the end you end up with 2.5 classes of USH before you take the exam. Calc
is very similar, Pre-Calc to AP CALC AB to AP Calc BC. It certainly has its challenges, especially around scheduling. But it keeps students from over-committing, the students in the AP classes have proven they can handle the work so they can cover all the curriculum, the majority of the students get 4/5s on the tests, and when they get to college they have a great foundation to handle the work.
My son has taken all of the available honors classes since 7th grade, in 6th was in a combined 6th grade math and pre-algebra they offered to kids in the gifted program who were qualified, so was in advanced algebra 2 in 9th. He chose to take APUSH because he likes history. But chose not to do an AP English yet. I’ll trust his comfort level with his schedule. It will certainly be interesting to see the results in a few years of the difference between a top 10 boarding school college application process and a decent Public school for my two high achieving students. Not only are the AP offerings and school reputations different, I feel like my BS kiddo definitely has a leg up in the recommendation department. Just based on the paragraphs long teacher comments every trimester from her BS teachers, they really Know her and think highly of her, and her classes had about 12 kids at the most, and her college counselor has about 24 students to help. My son’s GC has almost 300 kids. Luckily his is his tennis coach and has known him for 6 years already. But there was not a single teacher comment on his report cards and he’s rather quiet.
Personally, I am not in favor of classes that teach to a specific one time test.
I repeat what I said upthread: AP scores don’t matter for college admissions.
Two obligatory caveats: (1) That is limited to US colleges. (2) At a very, very few colleges AP scores might act along the lines of a tiebreaker. But only at a very few, and there’s no guarantee the tiebreaker would work in the direction you’d expect, and they’d probably use other methods in those cases anyway.
Also important: Colleges do not use AP scores to do any sort of “norming” or whatever of grades across different high schools, because they can’t—just for starters, the population sizes involved (even at places with tens of thousands of applications) are too small to allow such an analysis to be statistically meaningful, given all of the possible confounds involved. And really, the idea that there is some sort of huge disparity in grading scales across high schools (leading to the idea that standardized tests of whatever sort are needed to function as a check on that) is based in a weird sort of wishful mythmaking.
I think the just-published compass prep analysis citing that 30 of the 150 schools use the scores as a part of holistic admissions argues otherwise. A big factor? I agree with you—not likely. But they indicate that the scores are more important than many think and are used in admissions. Sure it is relatively few schools but I scanned through their chart and the ones who use the scores as a part of holistic assessment are very popular schools on CC.
If the school offers AP then it wise to take those to demonstrate rigor. for some well-known feeders, it may not be needed. In our area, there is one particular charter school that hands out As in AP courses like candy. At my son’s school there is one particular teacher that loves to cut kids down to size in a difficult AP class and brags that a C in his class = a 5 on AP.
So yes, tests are important within reason. They should validate learning outcomes for most students. As it has been pointed out before, when you apply to tippy top schools where every other applicant is 1600/36, how else do you compare kids? At the end of the day, ECs can be varnished, standardized scores cannot be.
Remember that the Compass Prep analysis only looked at the colleges where you might expect AP scores to be a factor—and the fact that they only found an effect at 20% of those demonstrates how little they matter overall. Also, note that several of the statements that Compass Prep counts as meaning that colleges pay attention to scores don’t reeeeeally say that—e.g., Amherst simply says that the act of having taken AP/IB courses and exams is a consideration, not what the scores were, and some, e.g., Wesleyan, even say explicitly that if the score is reported, the grade in the class is more important than the test score!
(I mean, I get why Compass Prep frames it as a need to get high scores on the exams—the more paranoid they can make students and parents about the need for high scores, the better their bottom line. But I’ll give them credit for being ethical enough to publish the underlying data even though it weakens their case.)
So I would strongly disagree with you on the importance of AP scores in college admissions relative to what people think. If you look on the CC fora and elsewhere, for those applying to colleges where AP scores are even reportable, there’s a widespread belief that high AP scores are effectively a strong hook. They are not. They are, at the most, an incredibly tiny bit of a package in which the effect of the AP scores will be overwhelmed by everything else.
4,055 out of 1.29 million class of ‘21 students who took the ACT earned a 36. Hardly every other applicant. (311,000+ applied to the Ivies from class of 2023)
Well, in that case, you have nothing to worry about then.
It will be a tough year with holistic admissions, test optional and so on.
And an extra year of prep work at a top boarding school will definitely give your kid a big advantage. All the best to your family. Please keep us updated!
I agree, admissions will be a crazy time for this class as well. There are no guarantees for anything! One of kiddos friends that just graduated, perfect ACT, unbelievable activities, sports, leadership, grades, AP’s, nice, great personality, did not get accepted to the University of Michigan, but did to U Penn.
We have a lot of work to do on the list of safeties and targets!
Good point. I never knew about AP prep books and will suggest getting some. 23 will take 3 APs next year, and the books may be needed to help with teacher inadequacies.
On another note, it doesn’t seem valid to me to say or think there is grade inflation when a student receives an A and a 2. Sure, that could be a reason. But the teacher could have taught outside the curriculum and the student earned As on that while not learning what was on the test.
Not every school out there is doing things the way they should. Not every school has experienced teachers.
Or in 23’s case, the original teacher talked about politics and didn’t teach, so the entire year was taught in four months by an overworked administrator / replacement.
23 didn’t receive a 2 but just using that as an example.
I agree with this to a point. However, a well taught and rigorous science calculus-based physics class, for example, with a challenging curve for an A, is likely to cover enough fundamental material that a student who really mastered the class would do better than a 2. Perhaps there’s a perception that classes “teaching to the test” are like some Princeton Review SAT Prep class teaching a bunch of tips and tricks on test taking or very esoteric information only relevant to the tests, or are just taking practice tests all year. Perhaps that’s true somewhere, but more often it simply means they are covering the range of topics the test is known to cover which have a large overlap with the topics you would expect in most rigorous classes. The whole point is to mimic what a typical college course on the subject would teach.
But for certain teacher quality can be highly variable. As can the resources, constraints and oversight the teachers are operating with. Which definitely disadvantages some students and advantages others depending on their learning style.
I wanted to chime in on this conversation of test scores to point out that many students with learning differences are extremely intelligent and excellent students but have difficulties with the neuro-typical parameters of test taking. Our DD is a 4.1 student at a competitive high school. She is also dyslexic and has dyscalculia. In her (many) AP classes she has always earned A’s, but she typically scores a 3 on the AP exams. Just to say, it’s not an accurate assumption to say an A in the class but a 3 (or even lower) on the exam points to some discrepancy or red flag, especially for LD students.
…or the student could have just been having a bad day.
…or there might have been a wave of some sort of respiratory infection sweeping through the school on the single day the exam was offered
…or the teacher may have taught the curriculum but was strongest in teaching J, K, L, M, and N while the test for that year focused more on J, N, O, P, Q, and R.
…or the sorts of issues @islandmama1 mentions immediately above.
…or et cetera.
Seriously, y’all, speaking as someone who regularly teaches a number of introductory college courses, and who’s been on a committee set up to propose and design a new AP course and exam (which we got pretty far on before shelving the project as not in the best interest of the discipline), AP exam scores aren’t related to grades or content knowledge in the way the College Board wants you to believe.
