Reply to Does Everyone Take AP Classes?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Whitman parent here.  Wish my kid had taken a full boat of AP classes each semester starting freshman year.   DD is now a junior and we will be lucky if she can even get into a place like Georgetown because she does not have a rigorous course load the first two years of at least 4 AP classes per semester.  Don't make my mistake, folks.  I'm disgusted with myself (and don't get me started on her - separate thread).[/quote]

Really???[/quote]
4 AP classes a semester in the first 2 years??  This is not a requirement for any college.[/quote]

The thing about highly selective universities is they usually look for students who are successful in taking a rigorous courseload [i]for their school[/i] which tends to lead to whatever is "the norm" at a specific school over time becoming the standard against which students from that school are measured. It is reasonable to me that a student could have accidentally fallen behind by not taking a sufficiently rigorous courseload from the beginning. However, I agree that this specific post doesn't sound correct.

I'm not familiar with Whitman specifically to know whether the numbers reported in this post are reasonable, however on the surface that post sounds like an exaggeration. in my experience from another school most AP classes are full year classes, not semester classes, and most freshman have not met the prerequisites to take most AP courses thus I think it would be difficult for a university to have an expectation of 4 such classes per semester from Freshman year.

Additionally, the math on this barely works out. Excluding the two capstone courses, which don't seem to be widely offered, there are 35 regular AP classes listed on the college board website. This includes every AP foreign language offered (7). A typical high school career would encompass 4 years, so 8 semesters. At 4 AP classes per semester, that would mean selective colleges were virtually requiring 32 of 35 offered AP courses in order to be a competitive applicant, which would require students to reach AP level in 2-4 foreign languages (depending on capstone course offerings) and all classes in the other subjects including mathematics and the sciences. That does not seem possible from a logistics standpoint given that it takes time to take the required prerequisite courses before taking the AP course in a subject.

While it is very important to take a rigorous courseload that constitutes strong preparation for university coursework (I'm the PP who wrote about encouraging self-study in Freshman and Sophomore years) I don't think this poster's claim regarding the amount of AP courses needed to be competitive for university admissions is accurate. Perhaps someone misinformed this poster regarding an appropriate courseload for her DD, or perhaps this post was deliberately hyperbolic in effort to comment on the pressure placed on our high school students.[/quote]

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