So my school offers virtually no AP courses prior to your Junior year, the only GPA boosting courses pre-eleventh grade being Honors Geometry and Honors Adv. Algebra. These classes are pretty arbitrary and it’s sort of up to the discretion of the teacher whether they’re actually harder or not (I know several cases where they were actually easier and BEHIND in curriculum compared to the normal class lol), but colleges don’t know this and you get a GPA boost from them none the less.
Anyway, I took normal geometry and adv. algebra my first two years of high school and was lucky enough to receive a 4.0 overall all four semesters. This year (I’m currently a junior) I’m taking 3 pretty hard APs (APUSH, APCOMP, AP Chem) in addition to normal precalc (There is no AP/Honors precalc at our school). The students who took the honors classes frosh/soph year are now in my precalc class.
My question is, in comparison to my peers who happened to take honors math classes, and now are currently in the same math class as me, will they have an advantage over me when colleges look at our transcripts? How heavily do colleges weight a small GPA boost frosh/soph years? Would my heavy course load now make up for my lack of honors classes my first two years? Is a cumulative GPA or junior year GPA more significant to top schools?
All input is helpful. Thank you for reading!