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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What is your "advanced" child planning to do senior year?  The main benefit to advancing early is the chance to skip a year in HS and apply to college a year early, with something to show for it

How did the Calculus whiz do in math contests? Precalculus + a high AMC/AiME score is far, far more impressive then MVC and Diff Equ
 The AMC/AIME score would show years of more rigorous EC academic learning than muddling through the school calculus classes.
Similar goes for USAChO Chemistry and F=ma/USA phi Physics.

If you aren't a USAMOcRegeneron finalist or similar, it shows that those advanced courses didn't unlock your potential, and you're already a book-smart test-hacking mediocrity. Colleges would rather gamble on someone who didn't race/skip the foundational study, and still has untapped potential.

T20 colleges know that AP courses are not up to their caliber. They expect to see you show that you've gone deeper into the subject than just box checking the course. Doing an AP course is table stakes for an highly privileged kid. [/quote]

Competitions are not the ultimate way to prove one’s worth. That may not be a good fit for some students, on the other hand you can even say they are artificial and irrelevant to real life, how many times you have to do 25 question in two hours?

Advanced coursework can have some benefits but it’s not a recipe for success or admissions to some top universities. Also they are not worse than an AIME qualification, they are just different.

One of the greatest benefits of doing MVC, LA, DiffEq early is that you can do much more rigorous science classes in particular physics, and the OP is right to take AP Physics C. Competition physics is not necessarily “deeper”, I’d actually recommend taking the introductory college level general physics than dabbling in F=ma type of problems.

For the OP, that type of coursework does look somewhat impressive because not a lot of student get to that point, but it’s not a golden ticked to anything, you need to have something else going.[/quote]

F=ma comes *after" introductory college level physics. [/quote]

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