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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DS took 7 total and is in his 2nd yr at Princeton.

What you took and why and how that impacted you is so much more important than racking up 12-13 APs.[/quote]
+1. Mine took 8, at a high school that offers many, and is at a T10.

I find this forum consistently overestimates the number of APs needed to be competitive. College admissions is not a race to the most APs.[/quote]

That’s because not all AP courses are the same difficulty. AP Calculus BC, Physics (2), Chemistry, English (2), History (2) are all 8 classes but are the most rigorous one can take.

If you’re going after the number you’ll do the easier ones like Human geography, precalculus, Calculus AB that don’t matter much.[/quote]

There is AP pre-calculus? WTF? What a joke. If I were in admissions at a top school I would immediately ding someone with this on their transcript for having the nerve to consider submitting it.[/quote]
The other side of that coin is someone saying they'd ding the applicant who didn't submit the score, under the assumption that they must have scored low.[/quote]

The fact that people are being suckered into taking an AP exam after taking pre-calc is a joke. It is a regular HS class. It is not "AP." Are we going to start having AP Finger Painting for kids in nursery school? An AP exam is theoretically meant to demonstrate mastery of college level work. Pre-calc is not college level. It is a pre-req for college level. I know that most of our discussions here are about top schools for which many kids take calc in HS, but even very average students take pre-calc in HS.[/quote]

Context matters.

In smaller rural counties, Calculus might not be available *at all* from the public HS. At such HSs, AP Precalc with an AP test score is literally the most math any student can do. [/quote]

AP precalc is for student who have no intention of taking calculus ever.  It means nothing to any college admissions decision; it's.useful for students pursuing a non-competitive college degree to graduate sooner and with less math, and for motivating/inspiring students who fear they can't succeed in the least demanding colleges.

AP Precalc officially isn't even a full year class -- it instructs schools to fill in the course with whatever fits their school's overall curriculum. Honors precalc is more math than a strictly AP class. [/quote]

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