I agree with the philosophy of taking as challenging a set of courses as suits the student, and pursuing interests rather than taking one of the “AP Lites” just because it says AP, for example.
Of course, this is easier if the school doesn’t rank or weight. It is also easier if one doesn’t have that kind of “top 10% of class gets into state flagship” kind of thing hanging over one’s head.
My kid took APs because they were the most challenging available and had the most serious students. They were therefore generally the most enjoyable for him. He took 9, which was a lot for his school. Actually getting college credit was never a consideration at all, since we knew that the types of schools he’d be applying to didn’t give it. He would have taken a few classes at the local university instead of one of them if we could have arranged it, but they were completely uncooperative. It all depends what the school offers.
I certainly wouldn’t agree to limit APs just for the sake of limiting APs.
@3puppies you are exactly right about how public school kids need to rack up the APs to stand out. It’s great to attend a small private school where the non-AP course offerings are just as rigorous, or even more so. But that wasn’t the case at my high school, nor is it the case for most kids at large suburban publics. Taking 4, 5, or 6 APs in these situations shouldn’t be seen as proof of grade-grubbing and anti-intellectualism.
@Studious99 - Even though the difference between large suburban publics vs. privates is clear to us, can you imagine the uproar if the elite colleges actually posted the reality of these differences on their admissions websites. @Data10 noted some of these in #10, but none of these schools routinely accepts kids from large suburban publics who come in with 3 or 4 APs, and finishes around 15-20% in class rank, over the kids who have 12+ AP’s and finish in the top 1%. They just don’t accept them from publics at that rank unless they are recruited athletes, but they won’t publicly admit it. So the race to take the most AP’s is on.
Actually, our large urban public did in fact send a more well-rounded student with a “lesser” class rank over a student with a “top” class rank to one of the examples mentioned in Post #10.
A few years ago, I looked at the Stanford admit rate vs # of AP classes among Parchment members with a 2000+ SAT and <7% class class rank. The acceptance rate appeared to almost flat line once hitting 4 APs classes, with no notable increases in admit rate, regardless of number of AP classes above 4. I listed some specific Parchment numbers for high stat Brown applicants in another post, which are quoted below. It looks like a median of ~3 AP classes among accepted students in this group, with no notable increases in admit rate once reaching ~5 AP classes.
0 AP – 25% accepted (22 accepted)
1 AP – 33% accepted (20 accepted)
2 AP – 20% accepted (16 accepted)
3 AP – 18% accepted (14 accepted)
4 AP – 20% accepted (20 accepted)
5 AP – 36% accepted (16 accepted)
6 AP – 33% accepted (9 accepted)
7 AP – 32% accepted (5 accepted)
8 AP – 36% accepted (5 accepted)
9 AP – 36% accepted (4 accepted)
I have a son that placed out of a ton of classes with AP tests but he also did dual credit and said that was the “deal”. If the colleges your child will be going to accept dual credit where they take the class in high school but it is taught by the local community college, it is easier and there is no huge test. He said Chemistry AP was one of the hardest tests he has ever had for instance but that AP Statistics was very do-able. Our large high school has dual credit English and College Algebra and a couple of others and now that I know how great they are for basics I will be encouraging my other son to do this. FYI elite schools do not always accept dual credit classes but public schools usually do.
Our S took and got 4s & 5s on all his AP exams. School admissions and merit money was still a crapshoot. His lab partner who took far fewer APs got into UPenn (which S didn’t apply to), got into Boston U with significant merit & FAid, and was rejected from USC. S got into USoCal with significant merit $$ but was given no merit from BostonU!
S took APs only in subjects he was interested in, which was still a ton of APs. He self studied for a few more APs and did very well on all his AP exams. S was only barely in the top 50% of his class by grades. He still entered college with the max 60 semester credits because of all his AP credits as well as having completed a college course. It exempted him from some GE requirements in college and allowed him to register early.
@Data10 - not sure what you mean by Parchment. Does that break out how many APs kids had from both public and private high schools, all of whom get accepted to Stanford? Kids from public high schools need to take more APs than kids from privates - typically because they are available, and Stanford requires “most rigorous” schedules. My D is a junior at Stanford. It is an awesome school, and she loves it there. If she had not taken17 APs , she is sure she would not have been valedictorian, and sure she would not have had the class rank to be seriously considered by Stanford - even with her perfect SATs. Because the number of AP’s matter.
@tutumom2001 - I specifically added the word “routinely” to exclude the anecdotal exceptions. But did your “lesser” ranked kid still end up in the top 5% in class rank? In our large suburban high school, kids usually need at least 5 or 6 APs to crack the top 10% in class rank. But pretty much everyone understands this going in. I know this is not the case in other high schools.
There was one student in my older son’s class who managed to be in the top 5% without taking any APs that they knew of. (Our school weights honors and APs the same.) She did not go to the same level of college as the others up on stage. Clearly a bright hard working young woman who went to one of the CUNYs that offers nursing.
I can’t imagine taking 17 APs - that’s nuts. I’m glad my kid had time to read 100 books, program the computer and work part time while going to school.
If high schools,were serious about this, they would cap the number of AP courses students can enroll in. Since they don’t, the,AP arms race will continue.
Crude limits make the assumption that all AP courses are the same, even though some may be equivalent to honors level for 9th-10th grade students (e.g. human geography) while others may cover what is ordinarily second or third semester college material (e.g. physics C E&M). There is also a difference in course intensity and pace (e.g. calculus BC is a more intense and faster paced course than calculus AB, if both are taken immediately after precalculus).
Or you can just cap the number of courses that will be weighted as APs. There are other ways to end the arms race. Scarsdale HS in New York did it by just refusing to have AP courses way back in 2008. Some students still take the exams to get credit, but they don’t even try to cover the curriculum. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/education/07advanced.html
Limits force students to think about what AP courses they really want to take. No one thinks 6 easyish courses will be viewed the same way as 6 hard AP courses, but at least the latter won’t have taken 12 courses.
Let your D take all of the AP courses she wants to. This means as few or many as interest her and she feels she can handle. Disregard the GC department and encourage her to do what she feels works. There are always exceptions to rules.
I suspect the GC is trying to get students out of the “the more the better” AP course thinking. For most good students one or two is probably what they should take at a time. However, there will be a few students who need to take more, ie some gifted students. I am reminded of the suggestion to take a study hall in middle school when my gifted son was there- good for most but he needed more- a full schedule. His only study hall was second semester senior year of HS when he ran out of classes he wanted to take- did not mean he did the work and got all A’s, btw. Likewise he took AP classes as they fit his schedule, no rules against freshmen, needing some regular versions first, numbers in his HS fortunately. No grade weighting as well.
Re “easy” and “hard” AP courses. Can depend on the student. Good at math, good at writing or not. I would not tell a student they should be taking AP X instead of Y because it is harder- let the interest dictate.
Parchment is a website that some high schools use an alternative to Naviance, which leads to a large number of acceptance stats. They used to support self configured reports/graphs, including the conditions you listed for Stanford. They dumbed down the stat reporting more recently, and when I last checked only supported the usual GPA vs test score type stat reporting.
I listed a quote from Stanford’s website which suggests very different requirements from taking "17 APs. " Stanford writes, “Such a course load is not required, nor is it always healthy.” And instead of saying, requiring “most rigorous.” Stanford writes, “pursue a reasonably challenging curriculum, choosing courses from among the most demanding courses available at your school”
The vast majority of Stanford’s admitted class does not submit class rank. At some elite colleges as many as 75% do not submit rank. When I analyzed the RD decision thread on this site, there was actually a notable negative correlation with class rank. That is CC thread posters with lower class ranks were more likely to be accepted than CC thread poster with higher class ranks; which likely relates to the lower class rank posters being more likely to have stellar out of class room activities. What I am getting at is students are getting admitted with well below valedictorian ranking; so I would not assume you have to take 17 APs to stay at the top of your class rank.
I attended Stanford. I knew students who took many APs, and also knew students who took reasonable numbers of APs, including far below their HSs maximum. I’ve never known anyone who took as many APs as your daughter, in Stanford or elsewhere, including among the students I have interviewed for Stanford. It is not the norm, even in high schools that offer huge number of APs… I was admitted with a rank barely in the top 10% of my HS class, if that. However, if you consider the straight A’s I received in university courses I took out of HS, which were not a part of my HS class ranking, then my HS transcript looks a lot better than would be suggested by my HS rank. I’m sure Stanford did the latter.
My daughter will head into her senior year with 1/2 a year of AP World and no other APs. She doesn’t have a chance in h*** of graduating in the top 10% of her highly competitive public HS because she is choosing to learn Arabic as her third language, which isn’t a weighted class, and she also took an unweighted class her freshman year. She will take several AP classes her senior year (Calc, Lit and Compsci) . What my daughter does have is a a passion for learning, a drive to succeed, a year studying abroad in Japan, a treasure trove of life experiences at 17, very good grades, and a very good SAT score (she took it in February of her sophomore year before leaving for Japan).
I am truly hoping that admin officers mean what they say about the AP arms race. I’ll let you know if that is true come next March.
At my D’s school, the kids with the highest GPAs did NOT get into HYP or S, while others with lower GPAs did.
Taking 17 APs is INSANE, if you ask me.
Beyond 6-8 APs you start to hit diminishing returns. That said, my D took all APs and Honors (equally weighted) not for the AP bump, but because the kids in those classes were brighter and higher achieving than those in the non-AP/non-Honors classes. I would have been thrilled if her school got rid of the or capped the AP/Honors grade bump so that kids would take them because they wanted the challenging curriculum, not because they wanted the GPA boost.
Our HS sets the curriculum such that a student can only take AP’s in Junior or Senior year. Unless one is far advanced in math (and can take Calc BC as a Frosh/Soph), the only AP’s available for under class persons is AP Art History. (great for the UC VAPA requirement.)
Class Ranking should be outlawed in every high school since it now has become gamed. AP courses and honors courses should be weighted equally to cut the arms race. Most private schools do it this way. They also have prereqs for APs that basically limits them to Juniors and seniors (with the exception of math and languages).