My parents are friends with Allen Lin's parents, and the whole Asian community in the county went beserk about this. He took 13 APs and got 5s in all of them, and he's taking 3 more now . . . so that's like 16 in all.
The only way to assure yourself of a national award is to get perfect 5's on as many exams as possible...to give you an idea, I'm feeling perfectos in stat, chem, both physics, and computer science. I took calc BC and bio last year and got near-perfects on both of those, and yet even I feel skeptical because of Environmental Science (I don't think I will get more than a 120 out of 150 on it, with about 60 of my points probably coming from the FRQ)
Can I state again how INCREDIBLY biased these awards are to wealthy suburban/private school students? There is not a single private school in my city that offers 8 APs, much less 15 or twenty.
Of course the awards are biased. The CollegeBoard is under no obligation to give Siemens awards out based on environmental circumstances. Since it's the CollegeBoard's money, they have every right to give it away based on whatever selection criteria they want. If you're interested, there are plenty of organizations that do attempt to take environmental factors into consideration (most top colleges, scholarship programs, etc.).
And some organizations set even more seemingly "unfair" criteria, like "you must be a child of a McDonald's employee to get X scholarship." Clearly these sorts of awards are very biased towards children of McDonalds' employees. But there's no reason all three can't exist, at least not in a capitalist society like ours.
By the way, someone from my (public magnet) school got one of those awards, so I assure you they're not restricted to the wealthy.
Replies to: 2006-07 Siemens Awards for AP
The only way to assure yourself of a national award is to get perfect 5's on as many exams as possible...to give you an idea, I'm feeling perfectos in stat, chem, both physics, and computer science. I took calc BC and bio last year and got near-perfects on both of those, and yet even I feel skeptical because of Environmental Science (I don't think I will get more than a 120 out of 150 on it, with about 60 of my points probably coming from the FRQ)
do you know how many of the science/math aps he took?
And some organizations set even more seemingly "unfair" criteria, like "you must be a child of a McDonald's employee to get X scholarship." Clearly these sorts of awards are very biased towards children of McDonalds' employees. But there's no reason all three can't exist, at least not in a capitalist society like ours.
By the way, someone from my (public magnet) school got one of those awards, so I assure you they're not restricted to the wealthy.
http://club.backchina.com/main/viewthread.php?tid=342952