He is in top 5% of high school class. Not allowed to take any APs until Junior year. There are a total of 15 AP courses offered but 3 of them are language and you can only take AP Lit or AP Lang as senior so cannot take both, as well as either AP Calc AB or BC - so really just 11 AP courses available to take overall.
He is interested in studying journalism/communications/sports management in college.
Wted GPA approx 4.3/Unwted 3.95. ACT 36C
Junior Year schedule currently is: AP Bio, AP Spanish, AP US, Honors English, Honors Precalc, Journalism
For senior year he is thinking of: AP Lit, AP Euro, AP Calc AB, Honors Spanish, Physics and Journalism
Is this senior schedule considered rigorous enough – 6 APs in total?
He is looking at schools like UMich, UNC Chapel Hill, Syracuse/Newhouse, Northwestern, USC, U Maryland
Only on College Confidential would “11 AP” and “just” be used together in a sentence.
Yes. After 6-8 APs, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. There may be reasons to take more, but college admissions is not one of them.
He can if he wants, as long as it is not at the expense of a core class, which basically means he can only take in lieu of journalism (or maybe Spanish). However, if he really wants to take journalism/Spanish, he should. Is the senior year Spanish course a post-AP equivalent?
@skieurope
Thank you for your input.
To clarify - he has a free period built into his schedule. So he could add AP stats without dropping any other course.
Next year he will be an editor of the paper which requires a lot of time - between that and college applications in the fall, he is thinking he would like a free period. However, if additional rigor is needed for the colleges he is interested in, he would take AP Stats.
As for Spanish, yes it will be post-AP course. However he is very strong in spanish and likes the class a lot.
Then he should keep the free period. He also needs to take into account the hidden class in the Fall: College Applications and Essays. Rising seniors (and their parents) always underestimate the amount of time involved.
That said, he should check with his GC when selecting senior courses that the GC will mark his schedule as “most rigorous” on the Secondary School Report.
He’d have 3 APs and one post AP plus journalism (which makes a lot of sense) and a core class. The only thing I’d change would be AP lit-> AP Lang as AP Lang would likely be more relevant to the type of writing he’s interested in and would push him more (there’s more non fiction reading and writing in AP Lang).
Not disagreeing, but that’s really going to be personal preference. If he finds Lit more interesting or has a better teacher or whatever parameter he wants, Lit is fine. He really will not go wrong with either.
@MYOS1634 and @skieurope Thank you very much for your input. He was debating AP Lit vs. AP Lang; he went with AP Lit because he enjoys reading fiction/analyzing fiction works and also because of the teacher.
