<p>I have been surprised while reading various threads that some high schools limit the number of AP classes students are allowed to take These limitations are always expressed as absolutes without exceptions: no more than 3 APs per year; no APs before junior year; only one science AP; etc.</p>
<p>Since the point of education should be to challenge each student to reach full potential, what is the explanation for these limitations?</p>
<p>The first thought that occurs to me is simply resource allocation. However, I would think that a school would be proud that so many students signed up that additional sections were necessary, even if it precipitated other cuts.</p>
<p>Another possibility is spineless administrators who don't want to sort out who is truly qualified to take and AP class and who is not qualified. Hard limits eliminate any appeals from those who are excluded/unqualified. This is similar to the grade inflation epidemic - it is easier to give a student a grade higher than they have earned rather than deal with irate parents.</p>
<p>Any other ideas? What reasons have parents been given if their high school has these limits?</p>
<p>My perception is that this is primarily (exclusively?) a public school issue, but I could be mistaken.</p>
<p>One final query: every adcom I have heard has stated that students can only be expected to take classes available to them, but I have a hard time believing this. I don't believe that a student who has not taken any AP classes will be prepared for the demanding curriculum of a highly selective university. Does anyone know of students who have been admitted to highly selective schools with few, if any, AP classes?</p>
Some schools spend a lot of resources on remedial classes just to make sure that the maximum number of students pass and are able to earn a HS diploma.</p>
<p>Schools also limit course rigor, because they believe that students cannot handle it at their level. I’m usually against these restrictions, but a rule like “freshmen can take no more than 2 APs” seems very reasonable to me. I would argue that a rule such as limiting a senior to only 1 science AP is going too far, but not everyone would agree with that.</p>
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Adcoms look for students who are the most proactive and make the most of the opportunities they have. Whether or not these students have taken AP classes, these types of students will do whatever it takes to succeed at whichever university they end up in. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.</p>
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Students who apply to very selective colleges and whose schools offer little to no AP classes sometimes take additional CC courses or online courses.</p>
<p>Our HS doesn’t limit the number a student can take in a year, although some AP classes are only offered once a day, so there may be conflicts. My kids have taken up to 5 in a year. The only AP class offered to the general sophomore population is US History, because that is how the curriculum is structured, so kids in non-AP are also taking US History. There have been individual students who have been advanced in Math or languages that took AP’s earlier, but in general it has been juniors and seniors. The AP English classes are part of the 11th and 12th grade English curriculum, most students take honors Bio freshman year and honors Chem sophomore year, then AP Chem and/or Bio in later years. Our HS only has one AP Psych teacher and one AP Econ teacher, so the classes are limited to jrs and srs.</p>
<p>I know there are private schools that offer no AP classes because their regular classes are rigorous and they may not want to conform to the AP curriculum. My HS did not offer any back in the 70’s, but I took several AP exams based on my honors classes.</p>
<p>Some schools do not offer APs because they offer classes of equivalent or superior rigor and feel like the AP classes are too limiting. These tend to be private schools or better public schools (Scarsdale comes to mind as a public school that has no APs). These students will do fine in admissions, but the schools are usually well known to adcoms.</p>
<p>While I dislike how they discourage many from pushing themselves most rules have exceptions. My school’s policy was you can’t self study AP tests. The counselor wouldn’t budge on it so I just talked to the principal instead and got an exception. While other cases are tougher the key is if you want something and the schools says no the first time that doesn’t mean you can’t convince them.</p>
<p>And worst case if you really want the test take it at another school. Any school that administers AP tests can test you even if you’re not a student there. Good private schools tend to be pretty accommodating on this. If there is a will then there is a way.</p>
<p>Ours doesn’t limit how many you can take. If I had to do over again I wouldn’t have my dd take AP’s. She is entering her Freshman year with 12 college credits. It has been such a hassle getting her schedule together. She can not take any of her major classes because they start after you declare and meet the requirements so she is basically just taking Gen Ed. She would have had these classes any way BUT the pre do her schedule and she had all kinds of crazy on her schedule because she already had her math credit, science ect…</p>
<p>Education probably has several purposes. Challenging a student to the limit of his or her potential might or might not be one of them. Others probably include maximizing the number of members in society who can support themselves through useful, honest work; minimizing the number of people who go on the dole or resort to crime; providing the populace with certain core competencies, complemented by diverse specialty skills (e.g., plumbing, nursing, operating machinery, electrical engineering); preserving and transmitting culture; facilitating interaction with people from other cultures.</p>
<p>Offering a gazillion APs has little, if anything, to do with those aims of education. As far as I can tell, since everything offered as AP is also taught in universities and colleges, offering a gazillion APs has mostly, if not entirely, to do with getting students into selective colleges. (If it were about learning per se, it wouldn’t be a big deal to wait and study that material in college.) If that’s the case, then I don’t mind if schools treat AP classes as a finite resource and restrict students’ access to them.</p>
<p>And there’s another issue here, too. An individual student or family may have a set of motives and goals for education that are not aligned with a society’s goals or a school’s goals. You may want your kid’s education to develop him to his full potential, but society may care more about ensuring that he does just fine and nobody turns out completely incompetent. IMO, the only way to ensure that the educational system has maximizing each student’s potential as its primary objective is to home school your kids.</p>
<p>The original purpose of AP courses and tests was to offer a fairly standardized way for advanced high school students to do college frosh level work and be recognized for it (so as not to have to uselessly repeat it when they went to college). Typically, these advanced high school students would be seniors (or less commonly juniors). Maybe an occasional prodigy in math would take calculus as a sophomore.</p>
<p>But the explosion of “AP lite” courses seems to have diluted this original purpose – when some AP courses have become common high school frosh/soph level courses, are they really college frosh level courses? Also, a high school schedule with 6 AP courses almost certainly includes “AP lite” courses, or “diluted” AP non-lite courses (where a semester long college course is taught over a year as a high school AP course), since a normal college schedule typically includes 4 true college level courses.</p>
<p>actually, these schools are doing favor to our children. they don’t want to turn our kids into OVERachievers! Plus, why would they want to take AP classes at first place? the AP curricula are developed during the 60’s when we were fighting against the cold war, and it has not received many updates since then. I would be scared if our children learn old calculus instead of more recent topics.</p>
<p>My kids go to a private college prep school. The school does not limit AP classes per se but there are limits as to what students can take that are built into the curriculum.</p>
<p>Our HS is investing heavily in concurrent ed…college cirriculum, taught for college credit, at the HS. Most colleges transfer the credit just fine. </p>
<p>But not some. Notre Dame and Penn, for example, have black letter policies outlawing them. In a real head scratcher, Notre Dame wouldnt transfer my sons community college class because it was taken for high school credit, but they will accept that same class if it was taken, say, over the summer. </p>
<p>I dont see any logical academic reason for this. Is this just colleges trying to avoid early graduations ? For monetary reasons ?</p>
<p>D’s private school limited kids to 3 AP classes per year – the “AP lite” classes are not among those offered. Since the school’s non-AP classes are quite challenging, and the kids are required to do a fair amount of community service as well as fine arts & athletics participation, we felt that limit was appropriate. I was admittedly irritated by their policy that D could not take a foreign language AP test without having taken the AP class. Seems to me that if I’m willing to pay the fee and the kid is willing to sit for the exam, then the school should let us have at it.</p>
<p>I wonder if schools also want to protect their stats and believe that kids who take fewer AP tests score higher.</p>
<p>Large urban public offering just 8 AP classes total, plus a number of DE, both “college” and vo-tech. Oh, and free/reduced lunch rate is approaching 60%. Honestly, I see an issue about limits on AP courses as an issue for the wealthy. Getting into highly selective schools or knocking off a few gen eds before 4year college isn’t the primary issue for the majority of kids or their families in our school. And when I think about the meager resources available, I see a lot more benefit to the community in providing those vo-tech courses. High school doesn’t need to provide the first year of college (and they typically don’t do a great job of it when they do try because they don’t recreate the college classroom). Those top kids can take their college courses (gasp!) in college. However, if a high school can help a non-college bound kid get a certificate which will enable him to get a better job out the door, well done.</p>
<p>Private schools are a different breed, and if you’re paying for one, make whatever demands you see fit. Public schools, however, need to allocate their resources a little more judiciously.</p>
<p>My kids school recommends only 2 for Juniors and 3 for Seniors. However the Seniors can take more if they want and the Juniors just need the parent to sign off on it if they want to take more than 2…</p>
<p>Obviously schools serve different populations. Our suburban public HS currently offers 16 AP classes, and sends 90% of kids to college. There is a regional vocational school that offers certificates, students can attend that part-time in the afternoon. I would be fine with them not offering AP if the academic challenge of the honors classes was bumped up to be equivalent. If they are going to be teaching math or english anyway, I don’t see how it is much more expensive to teach it as an AP class. If the school was boring and a waste of time, we would move to a different district!</p>
<p>Our son attends a school that does not emphasize AP courses because teachers do not want to be limited by AP curriculums and because colleges know the rigor of these schools well:
The AP program was originally designed to provide students with an opportunity to do some college-level work indicating readiness for college, help colleges place students into appropriate-level courses, and perhaps enable students to earn a few credits before setting foot on campus. However, the program in many schools seems to have degenerated into a meaningless race among students for “most APs taken” and highly-defined curriculums that foster teaching to the tests and are a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep.</p>
<p>Many colleges are beginning to question the benefit of APs, with Dartmouth being the most recent example I know of a selective college that no longer awards credit:
<p>I am not knocking the intent of AP courses and assume that done well and taken for the right reasons can provide students with a good learning experience, but the execution in our local schools is of the mile wide, no depth, teach-to-the-test, application-padding variety and was part of the reason our son decided to look elsewhere. He is a rising junior and is not planning to take any AP courses at his current school.</p>
<p>I think limiting APs may be one way a school can help students find balance in their high school education and help them focus on the broader purpose of their education.</p>
<p>Probably resources, or philosophy of the school, or both. At our HS no one I am aware of takes an AP science without first taking the “regular” or "Pre-AP"science first. So an advanced kid would do pre-AP Bio, pre-Chem II, Physics then whatever AP senior year or double up junior year. Only one AP is offered to sophs - Euro - but exceptions can be made. </p>
<p>HS also has a clear set of requirements for AP courses - you must have an A- at least in regular science first, or a B in the pre-AP, like that. These requirements can also be waived but it’s a matter of making a special request.</p>
<p>D was at an engineering program this summer and was amazed that other girls in the group had taken several APs as frosh and sophs. </p>
<p>At our HS, if you are *really *advanced, you take college classes which are offered at the HS or on nearby campuses (with no or minimal charge), or design an independent study with a college prof or HS teacher as mentor.</p>
<p>When I was in HS myself (small Quaker private) there weren’t any APs offered but there were definitely tough classes with a reputation that colleges that knew our school expected good students to take. (similar to Choatiemom’s experience) I note that now, 30 years later, they offer an IB program.</p>