Psychology

What courses should I take my senior year of high school? I’m planning to take AP Psychology and AP literature but what math should I take and what science should I take ? I’m in human anatomy and environmental science right now . I’m in algebra 2 for math.

Statistics would be the first math class that comes to mind, is it offered at your school?

Are you planning on majoring in psychology and that’s why you’re asking?

Honestly, it kind of doesn’t matter what you take in high school with respect to specific majors. Even for a math/science major, you’d want to have taken calculus if possible but I’ve had some math major friends who started with calculus (I even have a friend who majored in math and started with pre-cal in college). For a social science major like psychology it matters even less. I majored in psychology and I took AP Calculus AB and AP Physics C in my senior year of high school.

If you are in Algebra II your next sequenced class should be a pre-calculus class. I actually would recommend the pre-calculus class over the statistics class. A pre-calculus class will cover sets, properties of functions, trigonometric functions, polynomial functions, exponential and logarithmic functions, matrices, and some basic properties of limits. Those are actually really important concept in statistics, and you need the foundational knowledge first before you go in. Any high-school level statistics class is not going to be that great in that regard. And if you ever want to take a more quantitative route in psychology, the pre-cal will give you the foundation to take calculus and mathematical statistics. You can take statistics in college.

As for the science - that’s completely up to you. I took calculus-based physics because I liked it, and I liked my teacher, and it was basically a double period of calculus the way my teacher taught it and I really loved calculus. But there are lots of sciences that are related to psychology and are just generally interesting to study. So pick based on your interests.

@juillet I decided to take AP biology since I know the teacher and we have a good relationship. Do you think three APs is too much for senior year with stats? I’m going to take AP psychology AP literature and AP bio.i will have way over the graduatation requirements for penn hills senior high school.

It depends a lot on you. I took five AP classes in my senior year; it was a lot of work, but I enjoyed the work and felt appropriately challenged. A lot of people have also commented that AP Psychology is a “lite” AP class that involves less work than the other AP classes. I haven’t taken it, so I don’t know, but I think for a senior who isn’t doing a lot of other things and is ready for the workload 3 AP classes is an okay amount.