Hi I am currently in Biology Honors and I have an A and my teacher told me that I can skip chemistry honors and go straight to AP Chemistry. I am not sure whether or not to go to AP Chemistry. I plan to get a tutor to teach me everything I need to know from honors chemistry in order to be successful in AP chemistry. I am also planning to major in a STEM field.
It sounds like you have already decided and are just looking for encouragement. Good luck if you have committed yourself, but I would reconsider otherwise. What is the benefit of not taking Honors Chemistry first? Are you trying to improve your class rank? Also it looks like you may need to clear space in your schedule for the Honors Chemistry lab that accompanies AP Chem.
DS is taking AP Chemistry this year and he skipped Honors Chemistry. He did go through the Khan Academy AP Chemistry course over the summer though. AP Chemistry is a full year course at his high school and he made a very high A the first semester.
He said he feels like he was probably slightly better prepared than the kids that took Honors Chem the year before, mainly because it was “fresh” for him. DS is a good STEM student and has quite a bit of experience of learning online, having done most of the AOPS sequence in math.
I did pretty much the same thing as you are considering and had a similar sophomore year schedule. For me, it was a great experience because it taught me a lot of math/science study skills ahead of junior year. A few things to consider:
How much time/effort are you currently expending for your current A in Bio and all of your other classes? If you have high grades but are doing a lot to maintain them, it may be worth it to take honors next year and AP sometime in the future.
What’s the AP Chem teacher like? Are they going to be willing to work with you outside of class to help you catch up to your classmates if necessary? Are they generally fair and is the workload generally reasonable (given all of your other commitments)?
How is the honors/AP continuum laid out at your school? At mine, for example, the honors class dedicated a lot of time to the very basics (balancing equations and the like) before going into several other topics at a relatively basic level. The AP class breezed through the basics in a week or two (to remind all of the seniors who had taken honors as a sophomore) before going into depth on the topics introduced in the honors class, plus introduced a few new ones. I learned the basics over the summer and never really felt behind because I simply learned the honors-level skills for each topic at the beginning of the unit as the teacher reviewed them with everyone else.
How much time and effort are you willing to put in? Consider this alongside the workload mentioned in question #2.
What is your school’s policy on dropping APs? If you do need to drop, is it likely that you’ll be able to take honors without wreaking havoc on the rest of your schedule?
There are some students who can do this. I have also seen students here on CC who got a C or worse because they did something like this. And all I thought was “Well of course! you are taking a college level course as sophomore with no prep!”
So
Have other students done this? how did they do in AP Chem? Did they do well on the AP test?
How good is the AP chem teacher?
What courses would you take Senior year (i assume you would take physics junior year)
Why are you taking AP stats? Just because it is AP? I would wait on that.
What do you want to major in?
Could you drop it? or are you stuck?
What ECs do you do?
as @mathhappy says…how much effort are you purring into Honors Bio now?
I am currently a sophomore in AP Chem but did take chemistry as a freshman. I would say that you need to take a lower level chem before this class because it is already one of the hardest AP classes. I think to be successful you need to have experience. Biology is nothing like chemistry, and i personally think that although i really enjoy ap chem, you should do it junior year and take a year of regular chemistry first.
I wouldn’t recommend taking AP Chem without any chemistry background. Even if you’re doing well in Bio right now, Biology and Chemistry are very different classes. Bio is more heavily focused on holistic understanding of concepts and memorization, whereas AP Chem is based a lot more in mathematics and problem solving. There’s a lot of formula memorization. Doing well in biology doesn’t guarantee you’ll excel in chem too.
In my experience, we did about a week (tops) of review of honors chem material in the very beginning of the year in AP chem, and that was it. It’s too fast paced of a class to spend much more time than that on the basics, so your teacher will assume that you already know the important stuff from honors chem like the back of your hand. If the basics are not like second nature to you, you’ll have to spend a lot of time playing catch up and studying.
Also, I think this was brought up, but it’s worth reiterating - everywhere I’ve heard of, including my school, AP chem is a block class because of a lab period. Will you have room for it on your schedule with all the other classes you’re taking as well?
