Totally agree with this. AP Bio and AP US History are the most amount of work, from my experience. AP Calc and Physics who just need to "get it," not to memorize for hours. |
the girls can take 6 academic classes (no free periods). |
. Aren’t Ap physics and Ap bio both lab classes. I don’t know how you fit in two lab classes but maybe it is possible. I think it would require approval, and I would definitely make sure you DD was the one driving this because it could be a very long year if not. |
NCS won't let a student take 6 academic classes and these 3 APs. They can push US History to senior year. |
| If your daughter is at NCS talk to the advisor which will end this conversation pretty quickly. I also see no benefit of taking these three classes junior year and the risk of burn out or a lower GPA. If you have a top kid applying to top schools most, yes even engineering snowflake genius, needs 4 years of language. Top colleges want to see that. You aren’t the exception. They want to see you can handle the rigor of the five core academic classes. I would not take AP bio and the equivalent of AP us in the same year. She should take physics C, BC, language, English, US history. |
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Here are some numbers that show the numbers of boys vs girls achieving a "5" on various AP exams. Generally, girls outperform boys in the humanities while boys outperform girls in the hard sciences. Given the law of supply and demand, the most elite colleges may take a closer look at girls who are high-achieving in the hardest math and science courses. (Similarily, they get excited about boys who are very strong in literature.) These data come from a delicious, large, excel spreadsheet with all sorts of demographic breakdowns from a few years ago, before the college board deleted it from their website.
Number of girls with 5s on various APs AP Lit: 19,419 APUSH: 32,648 Bio: 11,241 Calc BC: 21,042 Physics 1: 3,512 Physics C EM: 1,776 Comp Sci A: 3,848 Number of boys with 5s on various APs AP Lit: 10,731 APUSH: 27,779 Bio: 9,672 Calc BC: 29,706 Physics 1: 8,270 Physics C EM: 6,293 Comp Sci A: 12,548 |
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Unless she really wants to take AP Bio, why not just drop that entirely? If she is heading down a Math/Physics/Engineering college pathway, colleges won't care if she skipped AP Bio.
My CS kid accepted at a Top 5 skipped both AP Chem and AP Bio entirely...but did take AP Physics C (both sections) as well as Multivariable (not sure that matters vs. linear algebra). Took AP Physics C year after taking AP Calc BC vs. concurrent...his teacher literally made kids transfer out of the class that had not already fully completed AP Calc, though all schools/teachers have different approaches. |
These numbers would be a lot more meaningful with denominators. You can’t say girls are outperforming boys or vice versa without knowing what percentage of each get 5s on AP exams. |