D17 will be attending top LAC and is only allowed to use 2 AP credits (can be used for anything except writing as long as score is 5). She will be allowed to use other 14 APS(5s) to start her biochem major further upstream. She is really interested in research and eventual PHD and has no interest in premed. She intends to do research in college. If she takes one AP credit for Research, I imagine she could legitimately use the high quality research she did at local flagship U (published) while in high school when applying to PHD programs. Would that be a valuable thing to do? Would it amplify her applications?
Applications for what? Grad school? If so, AP credits per se are nearly worthless as they represent high school classes. OTOH, the research that she conducted for those credits is a definite plus – don’t need ‘AP credit’ to include it on her CV.
Personally, I’d recommend that she use her two AP credits to fulfill GE courses allowing her extra flexibility in scheduling.
I am very confused here. AP credits have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on applications to graduate school. Whatever AP Research entails, it’s not going to be moving the needle for PhD programs. Further, whether someone got academic credit for their research or not is also irrelevant. If it’s something you’ve done in your past, it goes on your CV/resume and in the appropriate fields of the application, and gets considered by and admissions committee whether it was for credit or not.
Thanks. That was helpful. Not sure which APs she will use for credit, but your logic makes sense and will not use Ap research credit.
Which ones would give her useful subject credit to fulfill specified course requirements?
Or does the school allow all of them to count for applicable subject credit even though only two will count toward the number of credits needed to graduate?
I was very confused as well. It turns out that the College Board has started offering an AP Research course. It’s essentially a year-long course in which they write a research paper of 4000-5000 words.
Unless this course is done under the supervision of a college/university professor, I’m skeptical of its value for a student. I mean, the credit is nice, and I suppose the practice is nice, but I don’t think most would see it as equivalent to an independent study at the college level (which is the kind of thing you’d get credit for in college). I think the value is that it gives you early practice and may make you more appealing to be a research assistant in a lab, but the university-level RA experience is what’s going to be valuable to graduate schools.
I mean, if you have no other place to apply the credit, sure, why not? Use it towards the GE requirements. But if she has other APs that will get her out of other GE requirements, then I’d recommend using those.
Okay, but received a new wrinkle today . Received letter confirming Ds National Merit Scholarship 2500 and also a perfect score on AP Research (1/111) in World from college board …Change anything? Until then going to use AP AB Calc credit and and Take Calc 2 over for grade. and Take AP Art Hist credit for gen ed. No other perfects.
Ds School will be Vassar. Have read there AP policy but the curriculum is so wide open I’m not sure that any plan is great.
I mean, it genuinely doesn’t matter in the long term.
Graduate programs don’t care whether or not you got credit for doing research as long as you’ve done some research. I never got actual course credit for any of the research I did as an undergraduate. That’s not really important; what’s important is actually doing the research and getting the training and experience.
So, if she decides to take the AP research credit, that’s not going to affect her graduate applications. If she doesn’t take it, that also won’t affect her graduate applications. The fact that she got a perfect score doesn’t really matter; I’d be willing to bet good money that no graduate professor is really going to care that much about it (in fact I’d be surprised if more than 20% even know there IS an AP research class and how it’s scored). And the score doesn’t show up on the transcript anyway.
I have interviewed a lot of PhD applicants and trained a number of PhD students. We care absolutely zero about any courses/course credits from high school, and close to zero about research experience during the high school years. We usually ignore anything in a student’s application that happened in high school, and we tell our own undergrad students not to list any high school activities in their c.v.s.
I cannot imagine any realistic scenario where the high school research experience would be the tipping point in the evaluation of a PhD application. For our PhD program (biomedical in a medical school), the high school research accomplishments would need to be truly exceptional to have any impact, e.g. as reflected in first authorship on a Cell paper (for perspective, something most PhD students don’t manage to achieve).
https://registrar.vassar.edu/academic-information/transfer-credits.html describes Vassar transfer credit, including AP credit. Looks like up to 4 AP scores of 4 or 5 can be counted as course credits toward the 34 needed to graduate, but that advanced placement into higher level courses is based on department policy.
You may want to check if Vassar allows any qualifying AP score to be used for advanced placement and/or subject credit, regardless of whether the course credits are capped. If so, then there is nothing to choose in terms of which ones to use, until she considers taking advanced placement.
Are there any specific AP scores which she wants to use for advanced placement? If so, she should check what department policy is. For example, Vassar’s math department has the following recommendations for AP calculus: https://math.vassar.edu/courses/calculus.html .
A student who wants to take advanced placement may want to try the college’s old final exams for the course that can be skipped in order to verify knowledge of that material by the college’s standards.
I think the fundamental issue here is that students (and their parents) get into this mindset while applying for undergraduate programs that they have to just check a bunch of neat little boxes to increase their chances of admissions. Graduate admissions, and especial doctoral admissions, are much more holistic than that.
You can’t get by just by checking a box for research. Ultimately, what matters more than research experience is the quality of that experience, particularly as attested to in one or more of an applicant’s reference letters. If I am admitting a PhD student, what I want to determine is whether they have both the academic chops to handle the coursework as well as the desire and ability to perform as an independent researcher. “AP Research” tells me none of that, nor does a generic research experience. If, on the other hand, a letter from a faculty PI tells me that said student was great in their lab and has a lot of potential, that is just about the strongest endorsement I can find for a candidate.
Thanks, D got 5 on AB calc ( as well as all other APs) .Is planning on 220 regardless of BC score( would be shocked if less than 4)
Policy changed this year and only 2 APs will be counted towards credit.
We really have two discussions going here. First, the question seems to be whether to take the AP Research credit. This is a relatively new AP course, along with AP Seminar, which is a prerequisite for AP Research. If your college will give you credit for it, it makes sense to take it unless there are other reasons. For example, some schools charge more for upper division classes, so AP classes may give a student junior status as early as second semester, freshman year. In that case, the parent may end up paying upper division tuition for four years. In other cases, particularly AP Physics and AP Calculus, the school’s courses may be more rigorous or geared more toward subsequent classes. In that case, a student, even with a 5 score, may want to take the classes and not take the credits.
The AP research class description from the AP web site follows:
AP Research, the second course in the AP Capstone experience, allows students to deeply explore an academic topic, problem, issue, or idea of individual interest. Students design, plan, and implement a yearlong investigation to address a research question. Through this inquiry, they further the skills they acquired in the AP Seminar course by learning research methodology, employing ethical research practices, and accessing, analyzing, and synthesizing information.
Students reflect on their skill development, document their processes, and curate the artifacts of their scholarly work through a process and reflection portfolio. The course culminates in an academic paper of 4,000–5,000 words (accompanied by a performance, exhibit, or product where applicable) and a presentation with an oral defense.
My son took credit for both AP Seminar and AP Research (I don’t remember the course equivalents).
The second question seems to be whether the AP Research credit would satisfy a student’s research obligation for graduate school admission. In my opinion, the courses help prepare a student for researching and preparing a college upper division liberal arts paper, but it’s not as rigorous as or a substitute for what a student would do for a senor thesis, for example. And it’s of course not at all the type of research that a STEM student would need to get admitted into a PhD program.
I believe your right 99% of the time, but it was ground breaking research in blocking opioid addiction in Danio rerio (Zebra fish). She worked for a year and 1/2 in our states flagship U (10 hours a day for both summers, less during the year) and is very smart and got very lucky to have her data come out favorably. Her prof recognized that her idea about working with olfaction was unique and let her follow through on her own idea. Her study is being pursed for a phase 1 pharmacological study. I would truly be shocked if a Phd program would not be somewhat interested, forget the age. I’m just trying to figure out if using her perfect AP score is in any way beneficial ( like getting nominated and applying for a goldwater scholarship as a Sophomore). She plans on continuing research in college so this entire issue could easily be mute.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate the imput.
As someone whose job involves making admissions decisions for graduate students in a STEM field, I can tell you I 100% do not care about a student’s high-school AP Research credit or the project it entailed. It happened in high school. It’s in the past.
The credit portion, as I mentioned, is irrelevant. It sounds like your daughter had a great experience, but the research portion is simply too far in the past. The level of contribution provided by a high-school student is going to be lower than an undergraduate on the same project, which is in turn lower than a graduate student. The real value in such an experience would be using the experience to confirm her interest in research and leveraging that to get into a good research situation as an undergraduate where she can show her potential at a higher level.
I am sure she is, but so is every other applicant.
In research, as much can be learned from a failed experiment as from a successful one. Whether the results were favorable to the hypothesis or not is irrelevant to the quality of the research performed.
OP, I’m sure your kid is bright and hard working and if she continues on her trajectory will be competitive for PhD programs in a few years. But I have over two decades’ experience reviewing PhD applications and interviewing applicants, and training my own PhD students, and our biomedical program would not care about your kid’s high school summer contributions. If she is a coauthor on a paper, she should list that, otherwise there should be nothing on her application or resume about any high school activities. @boneh3ad is correct: your kid’s graduate school application will be judged by her accomplishments as an undergraduate and her most immediate past.