Will bad AP scores hurt your college application?

<p>I'm going to take 5 AP exams this year. (Uh, actually, 4 of them are self-studied…my school offers very few AP courses.)</p>

<p>So the problem is, if I do terribly on the tests of those self-studied ones, will the bad scores hurt my college application? Or will colleges take the fact that I've self-studied them into consideration? (I'm aiming for the elite schools, and I have no idea how they deal with AP scores…)</p>

<p>Any reply is highly appreciated—thanks in advance.</p>

<p>You don’t have to report them at all. For which reason, I would not report a score I wasn’t happy with.</p>