Hi, at the beginning of this school year, I decided to self-study for a few AP exams (Psych, Micro, Stats, Calc BC). These are APs that my school offers, but I just don’t have time in my schedule to take the actual class. I thought that self-studying would show that I’m a motivated student to colleges, but recently (after intense CC thread research) I’ve realized that Psych and Micro may be a waste of my time. I want to study Molecular Biology in college, so I think Stats would be helpful for data analysis in research. I’m only studying Calc BC so I can skip into Multi Variables. What do you guys think? I kinda want to drop Psych and Micro after hearing that self-studying doesn’t help much, but my parents paid money for online courses and I feel awful, but it also takes up waaaaay too much time. (To give some background on my goals, I would like to attend a top-tier university)
Top tier universities will not be impressed by this. They would far rather see you spending time doing your ECs while still keeping high grades and taking rigorous classes. You are risking your grades and free time for no benefit. Why take psych and Econ if you have zero interest? If anything, you risk putting colleges off, because self studying four APs when you have those classes avaiable at your school is a pretty clear indication to top colleges that you are trying too hard. They much prefer to see grades from classes. There is literally no reason for you to get those AP credits, unless you plan to use them for college credit at a lower ranked college.
My daughter self studied one AP. Our school didn’t offer it, and she is majoring in it. She got a five, and only used study guides and a text book. It was very clear in her application that her interest was in that subject, and it fit with the picture she was painting of herself. The picture you paint of yourself is that you might be an academic drone, and top colleges shy away from that.
Your idea about calc is good, so carry on with that. I am afraid your parents had good intentions, but it was a waste of their money. No college is going to care one bit if you paid for an online AP class, and there isn’t an arms race to rack up APs for top colleges. The generally accepted good number of APs to have for top colleges is 6-8.
If you have enough free time to self-study for four AP exams while taking your normal schedule, then your schedule is not rigorous enough, or your school as a whole is not rigorous enough, or you are spending all of your time studying rather than doing anything else productive.
Just to follow up and be less harsh, keep this in mind also: the most selective schools have very restrictive AP credit policies, allowing zero or two courses of credit at maximum in most cases. As a result, this means that either (1) you will be doing all this AP work JUST for your application, or (2) you can choose to attend a less-selective school to be able to get the AP credit for graduation, but those schools won’t care a whit about the self-study AP work for admissions purposes.