Pros and cons of self studying AP courses

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

I read about many here trying to self studying AP courses. I would like to hear about pros and cons of this practice.

2

Pros

  1. College credit and/or advanced placement. For example, I used my self-studied AP Calculus BC exam score (my high school didn't offer the class) to fulfill a prerequisite for more advanced math courses I took at a local university when I was in high school. Dual enrollment is free in my state, so I would have done this even without the possibility of college credit.
  2. Non-traditional students (for example, home-schooled students) may take AP exams to demonstrate that their education was rigorous.
  3. Some students want to learn AP material for fun, and see no reason not to take the exams.
  4. Non-US universities sometimes require AP exam scores from US applicants. If an applicant's school doesn't have enough AP courses, they need to self-study.

Cons

  1. It doesn't affect admissions at US colleges! If your school offers a particular AP class, colleges want you to take the class *and* the test rather than just the test. If your school doesn't offer a particular AP class, or you can't fit it into your schedule, colleges don't expect you to take it. If you only care about *getting into* college and/or getting scholarships, you'd be better off studying for the SAT/ACT or working on your extracurriculars.
  2. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you won't learn the material as well as you would have in a good class. You might get college credit for an AP exam score, only to discover that your prep books didn't really prepare you for the next level.
  3. You might not get any credit or advanced placement at your college, either because you failed the exams or because your college doesn't give credit for the exams you took. This is a waste of money.

TL;DR

There’s probably no reason to self-study unless you want college credit and your high school only offers a few AP classes. Otherwise, just take the classes at your school and move on with your life. :stuck_out_tongue:

If you want to self-study exams for credit or placement, I would recommend focusing on exams that meet general-education requirements rather than major requirements.

3

In our schools self AP doesn’t count towards GPA. Is this a standard practice at most schools?

4

@WorryHurry411 yes. that is standard practice to not count self studies for GPA.

5

It’s not a class, so you won’t get high school credit at all unless you make special arrangements with your school.

I think it’s important to understand that self-study is weird and obscure in the grand scheme of things. People talk about it on here because they have a misguided belief that learning “on your own” is more impressive than learning from a teacher. In reality, you learn more if you go to class every day and work on different types of assignments all semester, so you should only self-study if you don’t have better options.

6

I’ve only taken one, but pros for me would be availability, and cons would be that the test doesn’t cover absolutely everything so you might miss something important. (I self-studied Calc BC, passed the exam, then went to a concurrent enrollment Calc III and realized that I was supposed to learn trig substitution but didn’t; fortunately I survived without it, but would’ve been better if I’d learned it).

7

Yes.

8

My son took the AP Comp Sci test without taking the class because it let him take other CS classes at the community college and helped him get into a summer research program after freshman year. Most colleges don’t give credit for AP CS anyway.