<ol>
<li>AP Gov/Econ</li>
<li>Pre Calc Regular</li>
<li>Bible Literature (basic senior year english)</li>
<li>Physics</li>
<li>Marine Ecology (AP level course, but it doesn't have the grade bump)</li>
</ol>
<p>I will also be playing a sport, but will not be enrolling in the class because I want to be able to go home for lunch every day. I will be applying to Notre Dame, UC's (UCLA, UCSD, and the mid-teir UC's), UT-Austin, UW-Seattle, Cal Poly SLO, and other schools of the same caliber. I know that I am going to have a bad case of senioritis so I wanted my most rigorous classes to be challenging , yet interesting. Will this schedule be challenging enough for these colleges? Also, if I decide to major in civil engineering, will not taking calc while in HS hurt my chances for admission?</p>
<p>Not knowing your course schedule for junior year, and what other options you have, it’s hard to answer your question. Colleges judge course rigor in the context of what your school offers.</p>
<p>That said, my general impression is that your schedule is not particularly balanced or strong. I would have expected a language class – perhaps at an AP level, or an honors foreign literature class, an honors english literature class, an honors science class, a history class, and a strong performing art or visual art class.</p>
<p>To be honest, it looks pretty damn easy. Econ and gov are both easy as hell, pre-calc is nothing special, and I assume your physics/bible literature class is are just average HS courses. Marine ecology I don’t know about, but I’ve never heard of an ecology/environment-related HS course that did anything rigorous.</p>
<p>My IB Econ class is hard as hell, though. I went in thinking it’s easy but the number of tests, quizzes, presentations, papers… What kind of… Whatever.</p>
<p>My school doesn’t offer honors courses, only AP courses and a few accelerated courses (same level of difficulty as honors, but w/o the grade bump). I guess this is to prevent those inflated 4.5 GPA’s that everyone on this forum has. I have taken all of the accelerated courses that are available. This year (junior year) I am taking AP Environmental Science, AP US, Spanish III, Alg II/Trig Acc, and English III. </p>
<p>As far as Marine Ecology and AP Gov/AP Econ go, they have reputations of being some of the more difficult courses at my school. I am taking my visual/performing art a community college over the summer, hence the reason for the extra science class. Also, we only take 2 years of history and I have already completed AP Euro and AP US. I have already taken 3 years of Spanish (3 are yrs recommended for UC’s), so that requirement is completed.</p>
<p>My options are to take:
AP Lit or Bible Lit
Will be taking Bible Lit because I’m not going to be putting out that much effort for an English class
Physics or AP Chem or AP Bio
Will be taking Physics because it is needed for civil engineering
Marine Ecology or AP Psych
Will be taking Marine Ecology because it is more interesting and actually more challenging</p>
<p>Just remember- unlike everyone else on this forum, I will not be applying to Ivies, MIT and other top 10 schools.</p>