Reply to Is National AP Scholar impressive for top 20 schools? DS will have taken 17 APs by graduation

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]5 or 4 on all of them.[/quote]

I think the main thing is, especially if your DS voluntarily chose those classes because they seemed like the right classes, not because you pushed: it sounds as if you have a great, smart, hard-working son who's terrific. If some schools reject him because 17 AP classes makes them yawn: the college admissions process is crazy. You can't help the fact that admissions is crazy. Just be happy about the schools that do recognize your son's worth and admit him.

[b]If some parents here are trying to minimize your son's achievement: they're probably just jealous, or angry about the possibility that other parents could have bright kids, too.[/quote][/b]

ITA with the first paragraph.

And totally disagree with the second.  What’s really going on here is a disagreement about education.  And maybe some overlapping public vs. private school split.  Basically, APs are designed to make money and that leads to a lot of decisions that are suboptimal from an educational standpoint (e.g. physics and stats exams that don’t require calc, exams a month before school ends, multiple choice). They are useful to (some) public schools for two reasons — one is that they give students from unknown (to a college admissions officer at a particular college) schools a credential that benchmarks what they’ve learned against a national cohort.  The other is that they facilitate tracking (on a voluntary basis) that segregates smart/ambitious kids from others.

If you send your kid to a high school that has a track record of sending its grads to t20/highly selective undergrad programs, then the first function is unnecessary.  And if DC’s HS has selective admissions, the second is largely superfluous.  (Note that there are public schools that are feeders to t20s and have selective admissions, and that there are private schools with no track record at some t20s and/or that aren’t academically selective, so these divides aren’t strictly public vs private.). At which point, the benefits of AP don’t outweigh the detriments.  And schools sometimes act on that understanding.  Could be no AP classes, caps on number of APs, IB alternative.  Where they don’t, you have a collective action problem (at least for those who don’t see the value of APs).  And individual public HSs may have less room to makes these kinds of decisions (because of state or districtwide policies) than privates do.

I’m not jealous of or threatened by kids who take lots of APs.  I’d just like to see smart, highly-motivated HS kids have access to/be encouraged to explore better alternatives.  [/quote]

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