Hello, I wanted to take Physics and Chemistry at a CC over the summer or at night. I want to do this because those AP classes at my school are the hardest and I don’t want to hurt my GPA to go down any lower than it already is. In school I would take AP Psych and AP Environmental, which are hard, but not nearly as impossible as Physics and Chemistry. I know that they would be hard at the CC, but it won’t be factored into my school GPA if I don’t do too well.
I wanted to know if colleges (particularly the ivies such as Cornell, Yale, and others like Stanford) would look down on me for not taking them in shcool, or if they would see it as a good thing, because I would be going out of my way to take more classes.
This has been something I was wondering too. I actually asked a admissions officer from brown how taking colleges courses compared to Ap courses. She told me “there is a difference between taking a course at your local community college and taking a course at Columbia.” (which is funny because my friend who just got into brown was taking a class at Columbia) but I understood that to mean that a community college course does not equal an AP course but isn’t necessarily viewed negatively.
I took two college classes in my Sr. year, one at a college’s main campus, and one at an associated community college. The colleges I applied to may have seen this as different from my taking a class at a more typical community college, but nonetheless, I hope my acceptances, which follow, are to your comfort:
USA: UChicago, MIT, Georgetown, Dartmouth (LL), Harvard, Swarthmore
UK: Edinburgh, Manchester, York, SOAS, Cambridge