Self-Study: Yes or No?

<p>Hi everyone,
I'm going to be a junior next year, and im taking 3 AP's (calc ab, apush, physics b)</p>

<p>Ive been considering self-studying the following during summer(compsci major):
bio
apes
psych
stats
world
euro</p>

<p>For those worried about whether my EC's would take a hit; i think i have pretty decent EC and ill be continuing them all next year.</p>

<p>Thanks for your help!</p>

<p>APES, Psych, and Stats are very doable as long as you don’t try something like starting to self study the night before. They aren’t that work intensive and simply require diligence to learn and if you do it early (like in the summer) some review occasionally with detailed review before the test can do it fine.</p>

<p>Biology, World, and Euro involve a lot of information. Biology is the one I’d say has the least information but still has a lot. I’d recommend spending more time on them if taken then the previous three. Although focus on themes and not details in all three. It’s good to have one or two examples for each key thing (like knowing two key figures per country in a time period or one example of the real life importance of each key bio topic) but the main thing is understanding the idea beyond the different aspects and being able to connect, compare, and contrast well. And in history while knowing examples is useful the key still mains just main themes such as what kind of political system did many major countries have, events that separate periods, global effects each country had, religious system, a bit on economy (really just did they make money on agriculture, fishing, conquering, tribute, what?), environmental effects, and regional relations. While it may seem like a lot as long as you focus on the main idea for each group it’ll not be as bad as you it sounds.</p>

<p>As for should you do them, while I recommend going forth in what you enjoy and challenging yourself and its doable for all of them just remember why you’re doing it if you choose to do so. If you’re motivation is low than it’s better to do something else that could help while being something you care for more. A quick example is why psychology? Unless you want to look at AIs a lot than its relevance to computer science while not 0 is low and isn’t a class I believe require for a computer science major. For each of the classes you listed be able to say why you want to do them beyond just taking a lot of them before you choose to take them.</p>

<p>there aren’t any compsci related AP’s besides cs, so it’d be mainly taking them to beef up an application.</p>

<p>Ecology in AP Bio and APES overlap a bit. I can’t speak for the other exams, but you’ll be fine for APES for sure. I studied for an hour per day on the bus for two weeks (so ~10 hours total), and found the exam pretty easy. But then again, I just took it, and won’t know my results yet, so for all I know, I got a 1 :stuck_out_tongue: But when writing the test, there were only 8 MCs I didn’t know, and ~8 more that I wasn’t sure of. A lot of its just common sense. Like Question 2 of the (4) FRQs required NO APES knowledge. It was all simple math, and except for a) and e), which were “Identify 3 strategies the federal government could implement to encourage the use of battery electric vehicles” and “Describe 2 economic impacts that result from having more battery electric vehicles”.</p>