Note that medical school applications require reporting repeats of AP credit as repeated courses, presumably to make grade grubbing more obvious.
Yes—not the path I took nor would my stem kid if she were premed, but repeating is a path that works for some! For Chemistry in particular, my guess based on posts on CC and folks in real life is that most premeds repeat it, and that particular repeat hasn’t affected their success in admissions.
Wouldn’t a student interested in repeating courses simply not report their AP scores to the college when admitted? If the college doesn’t have the scores, they can’t issue AP credit and they wouldn’t be dinged by med schools. Wasn’t relevant for my kids, but seems like a simple solution to those who feel they need to repeat introductory courses. And for the record, perhaps due to my kids’ AP classes being during covid years, but I wouldn’t assume grade grubbing. The quality of high school instruction varies widely, I can see a student wanting repeat a course at university if they feel the AP course doesn’t match the quality of their matriculating university.
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True, that is a way to avoid having to mark a repeat of AP credit as a repeat for medical school applications. However, it does require that a pre-med prefrosh know about this in order to avoid reporting AP scores that most will do if they have them.
Mine is double majoring bc she has space to do that due to a lot of AP credit. It’ll take her 4 years but if she wasn’t double majoring, she would graduate early. I don’t want to rush her. She has her whole life to work. (And she does go to an instate public school, so for us it is affordable to pay for 4 years)
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The best use of AP and DE credit for my oldest son is he will graduate in 4 years despite changing his major Junior year. His state flagship granted credit for all of the AP and CC units he earned. However, my younger son (at a private school) was limited to a paltry 9 units, and even those units were just granted as general elective credit. Still, he does not regret taking the classes because at his large public high school, “college prep” classes (non honors, non AP) were definitely an inferior experience. He could have skipped the AP exams though.
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When you are paying full tuition and room and board, you are motivated to graduate early. Take the correct combination of AP and cc classes and choose the right school. Requires planning, luck, and motivation. A lot of kids and parents don’t want to graduate early and that is fine also.
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