OUr GC said 1) take at least 5 APs over 4 years, 2) take 5 academic subjects junior year (english, science, math, history,foreign language, psych etc) and 3) try to get as many As as possible and dont get Cs.
@sunnyschool: Answer is, APES.
The student already has the three foundation courses (bio, chem, physics), plus 2 AP’s. They have covered everything any college might ask for and are free to choose whichever other science, AP or not, that they wish to take.
They do need a math class, an English class, a social science class, and if they’ve not reached level 3 or 4 in a foreign language, add that too. Then they’re okay taking electives and classes of personal interest. 
Thanks! He will also have Precalc Honors so I think we may go with AP Stats as he will likely enjoy that more.
He also has to take the Level 3 Spanish, and of course English and History.
How would a competitive college look if student take 5 APs as a junior and score 3.9+ (AP BC Calc, AP Science, AP English, AP Comp science, and AP language)? And still devote a lot of hours in extracurricular activities in multiple activities and hold very meaningful leaderships positions.
3.9 means all As? Then that looks good, obviously. Is this a trick question?
My post was meant to be what GC said was the minimum to be competitive at good schools. Then after that its a matter of what kind of school you want and what they are looking for. Certainly with a 3.9 a university honors program is likely.
I think that people on this website don’t realize how poor a 3.7 transcript can look with 4 years of classes. A 3.7 UW is generally considered decent or strong here, but allows for 17 Bs (or 8.5 Cs) on semester report cards if 7 credits are taken each semester and all other grades are As. That would be a very good transcript for competitive publics and boarding schools, but it might not look so good for your run-of-the-mill average school, especially if 30-40% of any given class gets an A most of the time.
You do realize that with the common app they have the technology to calculate any GPA they want with any weighting scheme they want? The schools are not ignoring your kid’s advanced classes. They are simply normalizing over the variation in strategies across districts. (For example, the next county to ours gives a .5 weight to honors, and a 1.0 weight to any AP/IB. My county doesn’t weight honors. How do you compare? You ask for the unweighted, and the level, and then you do your own math.
If my kid hadn’t taken the advanced math and science classes, he wouldn’t be heading to CSE.
As long as a student isn’t struggling, they should take the most challenging courses they can handle without being overloaded. Admissions looks at the grades and level of courses. They look carefully at how each high school grades, so the weighting your high school does really doesn’t matter, except for things like states who give the top student free tuition. My kid’s school doesn’t weight at all. I didn’t even realize this was a thing until I started seeing people posing GPAs over 4.0. Didn’t hurt her prospects at all even though technically her GPA was much lower than those kids who went to schools with weighted GPAs.
And for the person above with IB courses - I have discovered that just being an IB diploma candidate puts you near the top of the pile at many colleges.