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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ah I took 7 AP classes my senior year. I held on until around December and then had a bit of a breakdown and became very depressed and even suicidal. I ended up getting a few Ds and was scared about my college acceptance getting rescinded. It was not and everything turned out okay but I would not support my child doing this. [/quote]

NP here. OP, please listen to this post above.

I'm surprised that any school guidance counselor would let a kid take seven APs in one year including double science. Yes, I get that some kids love to learn. But OP, we here online can't know if your kid is doing this because she loves to learn or because she feels pressured (from inside herself, from seeing other friends load up on AP, from home, whatever) to do this. Even if she is the world's best student and adores learning, she is killing herself and the year has only just begun. All-nighters are never good. Lack of sleep over time is damaging to the body and the mind, and it is impossible to "make up" sleep later; our bodies do not work like that.

OP, did you know last spring during course selection that she was signing up for seven APs for this school year? Did you approve of it at the time? Didn't you have to sign off on the class choices? I would be furious if a counselor let my kid load up like that with no warning to her or to me. How is she supposed to achieve good grades if she has zero time to absorb what she is learning?

She may wake up to the problem if you tell her that the time-consuming extracurricular must go, since she is spending all night on schoolwork and needs to sleep. If she wants to keep that extracurricular she would need to change out of some of the APs. (OK, DCUM, scream that she will never, ever get into any college if she doesn't have massive ECs and seven APs.)

Please talk to your DD ASAP about her expectations for all these APs. If your DD is thinking she will take all these APs and be allowed to skip a ton of college classes, she may be very disappointed later when she finds out that every AP credit does not automatically translate into skipping a college class. I know a kid who had straight As through all of high school in every subject and took APs including in the summers online, and she found that her elite college program wanted things taught "their way" so they would not allow her to place out of nearly as many required classes as she and her parents had believed. The college approach was basically, it's great you've gotten all this foundation and you can skip a few things but nope, you still have to take our base classes for many things. I'm not saying she should not have had any APs but she did approach them in HS as a way to tick off college credit, only to find at college that things didn't work quite that way. She didn't do it out of love of every subject but to get credits racked up. That's no way to [i]learn[/i].

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