Placement in college

[Anonymous]

My private school kids both took AP exams without taking the AP courses so they could potentially place out of classes in college. It depends on the college and exam score on which classes students can place out of, but for both of mine they were able to place into higher math and waive the foreign language requirement.

[Anonymous]

If your child is strong at math - then I'd say it's worth sitting for the AP exam. It likely won't take too much studying. Similarly, if they are in a private school - taking the English exam without studying tends to yield strong enough results as well. (note - these results are for college placement - if you want them to get 5's for admissions - then some studying is probably a good idea - but - it does take time)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If your child is strong at math - then I'd say it's worth sitting for the AP exam. It likely won't take too much studying. Similarly, if they are in a private school - taking the English exam without studying tends to yield strong enough results as well. (note - these results are for college placement - if you want them to get 5's for admissions - then some studying is probably a good idea - but - it does take time)

Me again - my college student took AP Lit, AP Calc, APUSH, AP Spanish and was able to get 3 credits for a freshman writing course and 6 credits for Calc 1 (and skip both of those requirements fully - no replacement courses needed) and was able to translate the AP Spanish into 6 credits (but had to take at least one Spanish 300 level for those credits to be given....so not as useful if someone wasn't planning on taking more Spanish). They could have gotten more credits for Calc if they had gotten a higher AP score - but their major required additional math that could not be replaced by AP - so they were glad to take Calc II as one of the requirements instead of starting at a higher level course as the starting point. (although - they will probably still take the extra math anyway). They did not end up taking science APs - it wouldn't have helped anyway because their degree wasn't science and the scores required were high enough that they would have needed to study hard.