<p>Ok - your parents did not PM me and ask me to post this...</p>
<p>Anyways...FYI, AP exams 6 weeks away....do you have your review book?
Start studying...nothing worse than having to spend freshman year repeating one or more boring classes....(Note to file: You have to take freshman english at CMU- regardless of your APLang or APLit scores-- those fill a GE requirement even if you get a 5).</p>
<p>Take a strategic look at CMU's AP credit policy in planning your studying efforts. Place this in the CMU search window for your school -- SCS, CIT, etc. have different requirements.
Calc - need 4 or 5 for one or more classes PLUS you must take a CMU placement exam even if you get a 5 on CalcBC
Physics, Chem, BIO 5s
Computer Science 5 (4 only bumps you up but not placing out)
Econ 5</p>
<p>so think through what you do not want to sit through again in the Fall...and make sure you go out of your way to study the next 6 weeks.... Pain now worth it over pain in the fall...</p>
<p>Any AP exam you take now is going to be a heck of alot less difficult than any CMU exam in a similar subject...</p>
<p>Timely post. My son is an IB student, but some schools reward AP better. (But ha - some schools accept neither IB nor AP). He needs to decide and turn in his AP test registration form by Tuesday.</p>
<p>I’m glad mom2012and14 mentioned this because it is honestly the best possible advice that can be given to a future CMU student. Take AS MANY AP classes as you can, and put in whatever effort it’s going to take to get 4’s-5’s on the exams. In particular: Comp Sci, Calc BC, Physics C (Mech AND E&M), Chem. If you’ve never programmed before, then maybe, MAYBE 15-110 intro to programming will be interesting and fun for you, but for the most part, the intro level classes for these courses are arbitrarily hard and not exciting at all (from what my friends tell me :P). The reason CMU is so willing to give credit for these classes is because they cover material that you COULD HAVE learned in high school… (i.e. it’s not something worth 50k tuition). Same goes for history… if you memorized facts and turned it into an essay in APUSH, it’s not going to be much different here, so get it out of the way while you can.</p>
<p>I might argue as to whether or not econ at CMU is harder than it would have been in high school (i never took the econ AP). Perhaps with klepper in the fall, but as it is taught this semester, the class is literally a joke. A 30 minute break from 20 hours of CS problem sets is more than enough time to guarantee an A on a week’s worth of econ homework, and review for the tests consists of staying awake in class and flipping through the notes (at most twice) an hour before.</p>
<p>With that in mind, I feel that there is a fine distinction to be made. There are those classes such as Physics or Calculus which will be boring, but also suck huge chunks of time from your schedule that you could be dedicating to classes you actually enjoy. These are the classes you definitely want credit for. Then there are classes such as history or econ, that yeah, it would be nice not to have to take them, but since you gotta have a break somewhere in your schedule it’s not the end of the world to take a no-brainier like them again.</p>
<p>Once you get your gen-ed out of the way, life will be brighter. As it stands, after this semester i have 17 classes to take, 11 of which are in my major and 6 are free-electives…all thanks to AP’s, seriously.</p>
<p>If your HS teacher is on target…your curriculum should be finished by early April allowing 2-3 weeks of in-class review aside from any spring break…</p>
<p>But it’s not your teacher’s headache if s/he doesn’t review…you gotta do it…you really don’t want to take Calc again do you?</p>
<p>As noted earlier, you can get credit for a variety of courses which will help fulfill requirements and give you a lot more flexibility in your schedule, not to mention allowing you to avoid having to take five courses every semester.</p>