Teacher Reccomendations
You want to pick teachers that fulfill as many of these characteristics as possible:
-They’ve known you really well. They even know the quirky, kinda awkward side of you. You should have talked to them for over two years in highschool and have gotten to know each other.
-They’ve written recommendations that get their students into great colleges, such as Stanford.
-They’re known to be a fantastic writer (typically an English teacher is a phenomenal writer)
-They’re a deep, thoughtful, and even possibly a philosophical and abstract individual, at least compared to your other teachers.
Here’s why:
-If they know you well, they will validate what you say on your application. This is great, since Stanford probably ranks applicants on how well they reflect their personality by matching what they say about themselves to what others say about themselves.
-Recommendations that get kids into Stanford are usually a great indicator that the teacher is a strong recommender.
-If they like you and are a great writer, they will be a strong recommender.
-Deep, thoughtful teachers can probably see things inside you that you aren’t be able to see within yourself. They add dimensionality and complexities to your application that make you seem more…alive.
Don’t pick teachers simply because:
-You’ve known them the longest
-You have the best grade in their class
-They teach the field you want to major in, and you’re afraid that if you pick a teacher who didn’t teach you for a field you’re passionate about it will look badly and incongruous in your application.
AP Scores
I’d employ either one of two strategies in reporting your AP scores: (1) report all of the ones you got either a 3, 4, or 5 on, or (2) report only the AP subjects that matter to you. Here’s why only reporting 5s is a bad idea: if you’re the typical kid like me with a good mix of 3s, 4s, and 5s, you may end up realizing that you got 5s on tests that didn’t matter to you and 3s on tests that mattered a lot to you. For me, for example, I could have cared less about the Calculus (5), Psychology (5), and Statistics (4) classes/scores but I really valued my English Language (3) and World History (4) classes/scores (in fact, I was getting teacher recommendations from my English Lang and World History teachers). If I just ended up reporting Psychology and Calculus, admit officers could have been confused as to what classes and scores I actually valued. So I encourage you to either be brave and submit all your scores, like I did, or send the ones that matter to you.
There’s also a super easy way to study for AP tests. It’s called Anki. People freak out about AP exams but if they have the right materials and the right mindset, they’ll be okay. You need a focused mindset to study for AP exams, but you also need good materials. Anki is the best material you can ever have to study for anything. Not Barrons. Not Princeton Review. Not Kaplan.
Anki is a flashcard software you can download into your computer. It’s based on cognitive science, and designed to maximize long-term memorization of information.
Listen: the reason most people do badly on exams is not necessarily because they didn’t study, it’s because they can’t remember. Ever studied for ten hours for a test, or crammed three hours the night before, and still got an F? That’s because you can’t remember the information well enough to recall it during the exam.
To use Anki, you type up your flashcards for a specific topic, and then you go through them. After every flashcard, you “rate” how easy/hard it was to recall the information on the flashcard. Depending on how you rate it, Anki will then repeat the flashcard to you some variable time later. It keeps repeating it until recalling the information on the flashcard gets easier and easier. And once it gets easier and easier, you retain the information on the cards for longer and longer, up to several years if you study them often. If you use Anki, there’s no doubt you can recall the information needed on AP exams, and will get 5s on them, no matter what prep book you use.
My experience with Anki? It took me from 3s and 4s on my exams to 5s. It took me from a 670 on my SAT Molecular Biology test to a 780 in two months. It brought my grades sophomore year from 6 As and 2Bs (taking 1 AP and 7 honors) to all 3A+s and 5As junior year (taking 6 APs and 2 honors).
The prep-book wasn’t what I needed. It was Anki.