“I’ve seen numerous posts from parents/ kids that have 12+ AP classes.”
As other posters have mentioned, it’s very uncommon, the cc posts are anecdotal to the point of being counterfactual. Even in schools in the bay area, it’s hard to rack up that many APs given how the high school curriculum is structured. What you typically have is no honors in 9th, except possibly pre-calc and that would be for kids two years ahead in math, only chem honors in 10th, so no APs till 11th. All the lit and history are college-prep until 11th, you pretty much have to take art/music for the UC/CSU fine arts requirement, PE is mandatory in 9th, many schools have seven classes and if you play a sport, only take six. They probably average 3 or 4, and these kids do fine wrt admissions. If you do the numbers, it’s very hard to get 20 even if you go all 7 periods all four years.
“I am unaware of any student who has somehow tested out of the normal progression.”
It can happen but only in math and maybe a foreign language, some schools here allow a summer class and placement exam to say skip alg 2/trig, and get into calculus in 11th, and then ap stats in 12’th where normal progression would be calc in 12th. It doesn’t happen in other subjects though.
We didn’t worry much about the IB scores (S2 had a 33), but he had mostly 5s and a couple 4s on APs. He was a National AP Scholar by the end of junior year, and between that and the IB difficulty level, colleges had a pretty good idea of what he had accomplished.
His school didn’t send projected IB scores to colleges.
As more and more schools switch to using the nationwide AP curriculum as a substitute for their own, school-specific honors curriculum, 12+APs will become more standard for those who wish to demonstrate rigor through course choices. At our local high school, there are no honors courses in most subjects to choose from past freshman year. That’s how my own daughter wound up with 12 APs when she graduated from high school four years ago. She’d have more if she was graduating today because the science curriculum is being revamped with freshman and sophomore honors bio and honors chem being replaced by AP options even for 9th and 10th graders.
I’ll admit I have a problem with how College Board has hijacked the secondary education curriculum of top students in the US.
@EllieMom - agree with you on the hijacking comment. For DS AP Chem and CALC BC classes, we found that the focus was very much on ‘teaching to the test’, and only once the exam was behind them did they get to incorporate topics outside of the AP. I also found that there was a lot of time in class spent in pure exam prep. I remember at the start of the year, one of the teachers proudly showing her historical data for how well students did on the AP in her class. Obviously I’m please if DS scores are good, but it seems a very rigid approach.
I can only speak to AP Chem. I tutor AP Chem and general chem at the local Cal State.
“Teaching to the test” pretty much means they are covering the topics covered at the university. A student who knows it well enough to get a 5 would at a minimum get a B on the final.
The area they would be lacking in is lab skills, and in looking at credit granted for a 5 by many universities when shopping for my kids it seems that universities know this and will often not give two semesters of lab credit for a 5 even if they give 2 semester of lecture credit.
I am very strongly against students taking AP Chem without a year of high school chem first. This is a very disturbing trend.
A lot of schools do everything they can to prevent the brightest kids from learning. They pretty much have to accept summer school work that is often offered by state universities. So if the school refuses to offer 7th grade Algebra (or whatever) a student can take it and then insist on being offered the next course in the sequence.
9th-Human Geo
10th-World History
11th- English Language, Chem, US History, Comparative Gov
12-English LIterature,Calc AB, US Government, Economics, Physics
All I can tell you is what is normal at our school and 12 AP’s is pretty average for the kids on the college track. In addition to all those AP’s, many dual enroll over the summer to increase their GPA’s and class rank. It may seem ridiculous but that is how it’s done. And we end up with a lot of UF kids.
@cptofthehouse Our high school is 6A size with about 680 in the class of 2020. The top 6% Auto Admit for UT Austin is 42 kids… those kids are all taking the most APs… others take fewer 3-4.
Regular classes are worth 1.00, Pre-Ap worth 1.15 and AP/DE worth 1.29. Rank is based on certain courses required for graduation 26 credits… with weighted GPA…
Maybe it depends a lot on whether your school offers Honors classes. Ours does, they are very rigorous, and the teachers enjoy creating and teaching them. My kids have loved honors social science research, honors Shakespeare, and honors Chem more than most AP’s. However, if we didn’t have honors classes, they would be taking a lot more AP’s because the regular classes are not challenging.
We have honors classes that lead to APs.
Algebra 2 H is followed by Precalc H then AP Calc. No honors Calc.
Bio H, Chem H then an AP Science.
Language Arrts 9 and 10 H then AP Lamg and Lit.
The only core subjects with no honors is Social Studies.
@SATXMom2 My school district in the city of Austin - has regular classes at 1.0 and Pre-AP/AP/IB/DE at 1.1
They believe all students even those whose highest reach class is Pre-AP should have the same ranking opportunities as someone choosing to do AP/IB/DE. So this means Auto-Admit general admissions is more for diversity rather than a true merit ranking. Another reason why UT Austin has separate admissions for the schools because our districts can operate very differently. Val/Sal don’t mean much in AISD.
In my school, for the academic students, 10-12 APs is essentially the minimum. Our school offers every ap course available except Ap capstone and seminar. This is the case for most competitive public schools in our area. Anyone ranked in the top 10% takes around 15-18.
People usually take 1 freshman year, 2-4 sophmore year, 5-7 junior year, and 5-7 senior year.
And lots of volunteering+extracurriculars is pretty standard as well.
@StarlightSami I am very surprised every school in your area has teachers who can teach Spanish, French, German, Latin, Chinese, and Japanese at the AP Level. Most schools just pick 3 or.4 languages.
It is quite common for students in the Top 10 % to take 15-18 APs. The school offers 6 FL languages and 33 APs total. However, this is a magnet program and not a typical suburban school. They also offer IB program and college classes.
VickiSoCal oops, forgot about the ap language courses. My bad, we don’t have Latin (we actually do have a teacher for this but there weren’t enough people wanting to take it to actually create a class for the past few years), Italian, or German, but there are courses for the rest. So, our school offers 33/38 of the courses.
If this were the case, i.e. all these hs with all these ap courses, then that means that many of them are not taking the test, because the college board numbers on ap test takers show very few, like less than .1% of high school students with 12 or more APs. Harvard’s student survey says the freshman come in with about 7-8 APs, and you have to think they represent the bigger part of the AP distribution.