Hi Guys,
I made a mistake of taking one academic course instead of Ap Bio this yr. This means I will end with 17 AP courses (according to what I will be doing junior and senior year) rather than 18. I asked to take courses outside of my school district but my counselor say it isn’t allowed. It’s been kinda bugging me but I also feel like I’m overthinking course rigor and GPA boost factor. I just have this feeling I’m behind the other applicants but I also understand that this leaves me more time to focus on EC. This is a stupid thread but would appreciate your guys input.
Yes, you are overthinking this. It’s not an arms race; adcom’s don’t pluck the “OMG, look how many AP’s he took” applications out of the pile and ignore the others.
Quality vs. quantity.
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Yes, you are way overthinking and you’re taking far more APs than necessary or even possible.
Are you self studying?
10 or 17 isn’t going to matter on a college app. 17 or 18 - definitely zero delineation.
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If your goal is a university outside the top 20, you’re fine. However If you’re targeting a T20, you’ll need 18 at a bare minimum. But really you need at least 20 to be taken seriously. But you can compensate for that if you score 1750 on the SAT.
Oh, I forget this isn’t Reddit where they have Crappost Wednesday. NVM.
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I’m a high school teacher. You are overthinking it, even if you’re going for valedictorian and every 0.01 GPA matters, you’re still overthinking it.
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Haha, my daughter’s high school doesn’t even offer 17 AP classes. You’re definitely overthinking this.
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From the colleges’ perspective, they just want to see you taking courses it makes sense for the sorts of applicant they are looking for to take given your high school’s available options, and different applicants from the same school may well take some different classes and that is fine.
If you do that, then depending on the high school and your interests, you may end up with no APs, or a few, or a lot. But that number ends up being is just a function of you taking the right courses for you given your options, not something you should actually be directly targeting.
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nah im taking kinda close to him, and im actaully prolly taking less than msot of the elite kids in my class. The normal “advanced” pathway kinda leads to alot of AP’s. Ig this is where op is getting it from.
lol mad funny
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I have yet to see a CC thread beginning with “Am I overthinking…” to which the answer was not “YES.”
You are way over the number of AP’s for which one more or less will make any difference. Most school systems in the US don’t even make it possible to take this many. (Are you in Florida?)
Even if it mattered, it would be water under the bridge at this point. Also, it doesn’t matter. If you get rejected by any colleges you apply to, it won’t be because you failed to take an 18th AP class.
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Agree with what most people were saying, you are definitely overthinking.
This is just unnecessary stress. You don’t have to measure yourself up on what and how many AP classes other students are taking.
17 AP’s will raise a professors eye. Were some of these self-studied? If they were, professors will not be impressed at all.
@skieurope I choked reading this 
Highly selective colleges don’t count APs, they’re not “impressed” by 12 vs. 15 vs.18.
They want to see whether you challenged yourself reasonably.
It has to make sense -taking every AP course under the sun doesn’t.
Assuming your Hs offers lots of APs, it’d look something like this:
9th: AP Human Geography
10th: AP World History, AP CS Principles
11th: AP lang, APUSH, AP Precalculus, AP Physics 1
12th: AP Chem, a mix of AP Micro/Macro/Gov or AP Euro, AP calculus, AP CSA or AP foreign language
This is only one example -a student who wants to major in Humanities or social sciences would have more of those jr/sr year, a student who wants to major in STEM would have more Stem APs… you get the idea.
Frankly, 17 APs sounds a bit like you went overboard already.
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