Allow me to first say I’m sorry if this is the wrong section for this. I don’t have much experience on posting here.
Anyways, this coming school year I will be a junior at my high school. For quite some time I’ve wanted to attend one of the SKY universities in South Korea (Seoul National for the most part). I have zero Korean blood in my family, but my chances of making it there is for another thread. As an international applicant, I’m unsure if the areas looked at for me are different from that of a native South Korean applicant. With this in mind, I thought that being the valedictorian of my class of what should be about 600+ now would be a good piece to my application. As of now, I’m number 3, however in my state of Florida, high school students have the option of becoming dual enrollment students therough the community college Valencia.
First, a breakdown of how GPA is calculated per class at my school:
- Regular classes: 4.0 for an A, 3.0 for a B, and so on.
- Honors classes: 4.5 for an A, 3.5 for a B, and so on.
- AP classes: 5.0 for an A, 4.0 for a B, and so on.
- Dual Enrollment classes: 5.0 for an A, 4.0 for a B, and so on.
Here is where my issue arises. Nearly every year of my school’s history, the valedictorian of each class took some form of dual enrollment. Most replace their entire high school schedule with dual enrollment and attend Valencia full time, allowing their schedules to have all 5.0 classes. In doing so, these dual enrollment students take less classes than us at our high school, as well as easier classes, as it has been univerally decided that the classes offered (at out Valencia at least) vastly easier than AP. My original plan in order to ensure the #1 spot in my class was to take as many AP’s at my school as possible and take 4 dual enrollment classes online in order to maximize my schedule. However, I am being told that no one in the history of my school has ever done that and it is not worth the trouble, as most schools outside of Florida would prefer an AP centric schedule as opposed to a hybrid of that and dual enrollment. The only conflict with this is that I’m also positive that if I don’t take dual enrollment I won’t be valedictorian, and I figured that the most elite universities of the most educationally elite country in the world would only accept the number one student in the event of an international applicant. My question to those at College Confidential is this: should I take the easier dual enrollment classes for the free GPA boost to get to valedictorian, or should I take as many AP’s as possible and risk the B and fall behind those in dual enrollment in terms of GPA? Also, if I were to take more AP classes, I feel as though I would have more free time to study things not taught in my school. One of those things being Korean, something that I feel would be necessary for a Korean university.
Thank you in advance for the helpful advice!