D will be a rising sophomore with interest in CS. She is lined up to take 2 AP classes as a sophomore and 4 AP classes as a junior (with a 5th class designed by her school to take the AP). So, she is set to take 7 AP exams by end of junior year just by virtue of her curriculum alone:
APUSH
AP Comp Science A
AP Calc BC
AP Physics C
AP Chem
AP Spanish Lang
AP Eng Lang
For an 8th AP exam, it appears from all of the posts that APES is the best to self-study for. D will be taking Bio Honors, so should play right into a self-study for APES. Looking for someone to confirm logic on this one. Only other options would be AP Stats, but she is probably going to take the AP stats class itself senior year.
I vote for none, at least if the only purpose is a meaningless piece of paper. Her time is better spent preparing for SAT/ACT and ECs.
Is she just trying to get it by junior year to put it on her college apps? I don’t think it will really matter that much.
From everything I hear, colleges couldn’t care less about “AP Scholar” awards. They can see what exams you took and the corresponding scores you earn (provided that you elect to report them, of course), so they’ll make their own judgement about how “scholarly” you are from that and everything else on the application. It looks like her schedule is already quite rigorous, so I wouldn’t worry about that at all. Also, by adding one more thing to an already hectic two weeks of testing in May, she may have to take some of her exams without as much preparation and score lower than she otherwise would as a result.
However, if she doesn’t have a CS background and wants to get more familiar with it before taking CSA (if she’s planning to take that junior year), I might suggest self-studying CS Principles as a sophomore. As long as she reads the questions and rubrics for the performance tasks carefully and devotes sufficient time to them, she shouldn’t have trouble earning a solid score on the exam, as most of the multiple choice can be answered with logical reasoning as opposed to knowledge. However, there will be some questions about the internet and data that she will need specific knowledge to answer (I think this is what separates the 3s from the 4s and 5s, in addition to effort put into the performance tasks), so she will need to devote some time to that, but not as much as for most other courses. If she’s interested in doing this, she’ll need to work out an arrangement with the school to submit the performance tasks because those are required to go through the school for some reason.
Best of luck!