I’ve heard that colleges like to see you challenge yourself, so if you don’t take AP classes, will that not look favorable? And also, do colleges favor a 4.0 student with no AP classes or a 3.5 student with a few AP classes under their belt?
The answer I’ve heard is that it’s best to be an AP student with a 4.0 GPA 
But in all seriousness, sacrifice the perfect GPA for harder classes. Ultimately, if you take the easy way, colleges will see you as someone afraid to take risks. And a 4.0 GPA in easy classes, given that harder classes are provided, will further go to prove that the owner of the transcript was unwilling to challenge themselves.
Colleges also factor in how many AP classes that your school offers. If your school only offers 4 and you take 2 of them, it’ll will a lot better than if your school offered 10 and you still took two
If you are reaching for the very selective schools they will want to see rigor in your curriculum.
For selective colleges, take as many tough classes as you can while still maintaining a 3.85 unweighted. For less selective ones, it’s better to take harder classes, especially for colleges that award a lot of credit for AP scores.
To a large extent this depends upon where you want to go to university. If you want to go to MIT, Harvard, Stanford, or similar schools you pretty much want straight A’s and A+'s in AP classes (and great ECs and great test scores and great essays, and luck and …). For normal “very good” universities (such as state flagships) you can do fine with a very good GPA (mostly A’s with a few B’s) in reasonably difficult classes (some CP classes, some honors classes, a few AP classes). For in-state not quite flagships you can back off a bit from there (either in terms of grades or rigor). There is a tradeoff between rigor and grades, a couple of B’s in AP classes is not going to keep you out of any university that would have taken you with As in honors classes.
My personal opinion is that a lot of students get very stressed out trying to do what they think that the very top ranked schools want, even though very few of the stressed out students are going to go to the very top ranked schools (and many of them would not like it if they did go there). There are a LOT of very good universities in the US, and you don’t have to try to cater to Harvard or Stanford in order to attend your very good in-state public universities.
Which means, take the classes that you are comfortable taking.
To give more background info, my school offers a lot of AP classes with the exception of a two AP language classes and one fine arts class. I just finished sophomore year.
Freshman year GPA: 3.733
AP classes: Biology and Human Geography
Sophomore year GPA: 4.000
AP classes: World History, Chemistry, Foreign Language(I won’t name which language)
Cumulative GPA: 3.866
Rank: 48/913
Good?Decent?or just terrible for a student?
Looks pretty good to me. Now that you’ve shown you can handle 2-3 APs per year, it would probably look bad to stop taking advanced level classes. Why do you want to quit?
The law of diminishing returns kicks in after your 8th AP, roughly. Balance is key : 3-4 ap classes each of Jr and SR year, judiciously chosen, will be plenty.
And as Stanford puts it, it’s not a game of who had the most AP’s wins.
Also, if the AP in a foreign language is a heritage language, it’d be a good idea to take a “real” foreign language too.
Sounds like you did make the trade off, losing a perfect GPA in favor of a more rigorous course. Good job! I applaud you for taking that risk!
@AroundHere I’m not quiting. I’m just wondering. I only fear about failing AP English language and culture this coming year. I still maintained a overall A average in Honors English but I’m not a strong reader.
You may be over-afraid of AP Lang - it’s pretty hard to go from an A in Honors English all the way to an F in AP Language.
Challenging yourself to keep improving your reading skills is great preparation for college. Many pieces of classic literature are available for free audiobook download on Librivox as well, if that would help you get through the reading. too.
*composition. Sorry if there was any confusion.
Take APs in subjects that you are good at or interested in.
As pointed out above, the real purpose of AP classes is to gain college credit and prepare you for the rigor of college. It is unfortunate that instead too many students are indoctrinated to treat AP classes solely as resume hooks for selective college admissions, when very few of these kids will end up at those “elite” colleges anyway (at which, ironically, they will not receive AP credit for those same courses they took to gain admission).
Take some AP classes to push yourself, and take them to either get ahead in your prospective college path or else to avoid classes in college. When I was in high school, I blew off AP Calculus, only to realize when I got to college that high school AP Calculus was far easier than college calculus taught by an international grad student TA with questionable English, and that if I had merely paid attention in HS I could have been taking Art History or something fun or in my major instead of calculus as a freshman.