My junior dd is selecting her courses for next year… she is more of a 4.0 student but not your typical one so am posting here. She has taken a couple honors classes (science and Spanish) sophomore and junior year but the rest are on-level. She has some adhd and slow processing so while she works hard for those grades, it takes ALOT of studying time and didn’t want to push her any further. Not enough hours in the day. So, next year she needs to take physics (schools mandated curriculum) and they just changed it at her school from honors (which she would have taken) to AP (which she is not going to take- not an AP science kid at all). Her only other honors is Spanish and trying to convince her to take Spanish 4 honors. How detrimental will it be to her if she goes from 2 honors courses to 1 or none? Also, She is not in honors math but currently in pre-calls and will take statistics next year, so she has advanced math just at the CP level. Her ACT will prob be around 25-26 and she will be looking at schools such as Muhlenberg, Hofstra, Elon, Clarke, possibly Dickinson and Ithaca. Thanks for any input.
Reading here on CC it seems that many schools are switching from Honors Physics to AP Physics…I am wondering if they are very similar. Talk to the Physics Dept head and ask. Or ask the GC if she can start in AP physics and then drop to regular if necessary.
I agree she should talk to the physics department at her high school. I’m not familiar enough with the new Physics AP courses, but assuming this is AP Physics 1, it may be no more difficult than an honors physics course. Only the teachers at her school will know. She should take the course level she able to do well in without making herself crazy. A B+ in an AP course is probably better than an A- in a regular course, but it’s really hard to know how much forgiveness and or brownie points you get for challenging yourself. But she doesn’t need to get straight A’s for those schools. (In fact you don’t need to get straight A’s for a lot of schools that might surprise you.)
I agree with talking to the teachers. I just made the rounds of the AP teachers at my daughter’s HS during their recent course registration open house because her guidance counselor is advising her to take four AP courses as a senior, when the most she’s taken is two/year. Also the courses she’s suggesting are some of the harder AP’s - like chem, calc, physics, and a combo course of both USGovt and Comparative Gov’t (my girl IS a science girl but weak in the humanities). My daughter thinks her GC is crazy.
Anyway, I found talking to the teachers very helpful. I told each of them the dilemma about her taking so many difficult courses in one year. She also has had very different experiences in the three AP’s she’s taken so far - one required many hours of homework/day and the two this year are less than an hour a day. So she was having a hard time trying to figure out if her GC’s suggested schedule was going to overwhelm her because she didn’t know how much homework each class would require.
I was surprised at how flexible most of them were and they well all very happy to talk to me and answer any questions I had (I was one of a handful of parents who took the time to talk to the teachers who had to set up booths and attend the multi-hour event, so I think they were actually appreciative of the parents who did show up to ask questions). Some of them worked with the kids who had multiple assignments/tests due on the same day and would let them turn in assignments late (one said as long as the assignments were in by the end of the quarter!). Another said that he’d give extra credit or allow test corrections to kids (the whole class would have that opportunity) who wanted to bring up their grades.
My daughter attends a pretty good public high school and there are about 420 kids in her class. But only about 30 kids out of the 420 take the more difficult AP’s - so I think the teachers probably try hard to accommodate the kids who are bold enough to take the harder ones, but might have a little difficulty with them. My kid is going to major in the sciences and will have to take Bio, Chem, Calc and Physics in college so she wants to be prepared, but at the same time, she doesn’t want to tank her GPA.
She still doesn’t have her schedule figured out - we have a meeting with her GC this Friday to discuss what the teachers told me (and to find out it there are options like starting with the AP and dropping down if she’s over her head).
She’ll make the decision after the meeting.
A few words about AP’s. One thing to keep in mind is if your student does the work and does well on the test at the end of the year most schools will count these as college credits. They might not accept it in a declared major but will instead let it count as an elective credit. Either way it is considerably less expensive then what you will be paying at the next level. By taking these courses now it will provide your student with the option of either taking fewer courses in college or possibly even eliminating a semester or more of college. And while these are college courses most are spread out over an entire school year versus a college semester so the pace is slower even though the materials may be the same. It is also true that if you get to the end of the year and are unsure about how you will do on the exam you don’t have to take it.