<p>AP classes have open enrollment; however, the number of sections available are limited, so the applicants are screened. There aren’t all that many AP courses available, so it’s not that big a problem. Sections are kept to about 25 students maximum. True story is one student who ended up attending Harvard who took only standard (not honors) math all four years. Honors sections are demanding as well, so many kids take those sections instead of AP.</p>
<p>AP tests are $74/each here, just paid for them. Don’t know why the discrepancy. </p>
<p>AP requirement here is 89+ in related Honors Course (or previous AP), w. teacher sign-off (they sign off on all course placement choices) or teacher rec or appeal. AP English requires essay; maybe History too.</p>
<p>Next year our school is requiring kids to sign a contract that they will take the AP test. Won’t affect my S, he’ll be gone; but he is choosing to take only AP Econ and Calc tests (not English, he took that for AP jr. English last year). I don’t understand why the test should be required: if a kid won’t get/doesn’t want college credit or placing up in college courses, why can’t they just take the AP for “strong program” on college apps or (gasp) for pure love of learning or the challenge?</p>
<p>There was no selection for APs at my school. You could take AP English starting frosh yr [that was the only frosh AP]. Soph yr you could take AP English, AP US History and/or AP European History. Junior and senior yr, you could take as many as you could fit into your schedule. It never happened that way more kids wanted an AP class than there were spaces available…for a class like AP US, they would just allow 2-3 extra kids; for classes like AP Chem that required lab space, they would just make it ‘senior priority’. </p>
<p>In your school are AP classes a source of insecurity for those NOT taking them? In my school there was a select group of kids who coveted the Ivys and other selective schools but didn’t really want to work too hard for them; just wanted to take some honors classes and 0 AP classes and then go around saying ‘APs don’t matter, there just like regular classes, they won’t get you into the Ivys.’ There was a good deal of AP bashing at my school, with the attitude of–anyone can take those classes, even 5 at a time, whats the big deal; and it came from kids who hadn’t even taken 1 and just figured, how much more work could it be, an extra 5 min of HW a night?</p>
<p>i believe the best school that anybody got into from my high school was stanford, and that was the #1 in our class. the #2 went to lafayette.</p>
<p>why can’t they just take the AP for “strong program” on college apps or (gasp) why can’t they just take the AP for “strong program” on college apps or (gasp)></p>
<p>The quality of AP courses and the weight given to grades varies enormously from school to school. There have been many cases of students getting As in AP courses and still getting a 2 on the exam. Students have been known to take AP classes, not for pure love of learning but for love of the high grade some teachers automatically give out to students in AP courses. Needless to say, many of these students have no intention of taking the exam.
This year, my S is in an AP-English class of 27 students, 25 of whom are seniors. Only 6 (including the two juniors) are intending to take the exam. Since the class as a whole is suffering from senioritis, there’s not much learning going on, apparently.</p>
<p>marite:</p>
<p>absolutely correct. There were several AP’s at our HS that seniors begged to get into bcos they were easy A’s from the teacher. Thus, many kids enrolled in the class for the extra grade point boost, but had no intent on taking the AP tests. Imagine their surprise this year when the faculy rotated some assignments over the summer due to a pending retirement, and now, those classes are being taught like a true AP course, i.e., with lotsa homework and reading! </p>
<p>I met up with a GC over break and he was joking about how many seniors came in and asked: “how would it look if I dropped xx ap course?” Not that they were doing poorly, but the seniors had planned on cruising this year in those classes. :)</p>
<p>In our school, as a sophomore, you can take AP Bio, AP Psych, and AP Euro; as a Junior and Senior there are about 15 more APs available.</p>
<p>In order to get into an AP class, the student has to have an A- in the prerequisite class the year before + get a teacher recommendation. And you are obliged to take the AP exam at the end of the year, which btw counts for 20% of the school grade.</p>
<p>School in the next town has prequalifying exams in March, for students who want to do take APs the next year.</p>
<p>And yes, we pay $82.00 per exam.</p>
<p>In our school, there are a few students who take AP-Calc in 10th grade. One or two also take Science APs in 9th and 10th grades as a result of taking CTY courses. I don’t believe there are freshmen or sophomores in APs in humanities and social studies but I could be wrong.</p>
<p>Our local public school offers all the AP classes for which the College Board has exams. Students can take AP Bio in 9th grade, but only a handful do. We even have an 8th grader taking AP bio this year. In 10th grade they can take AP Euro. But most kids in the school don’t take APs until junior year. </p>
<p>The system is that teachers make course recommendations for the following year, signing the student registration card. But kids with parental permission may “override” the recommendation by going through the counselor. Class offerings are established by demand. Some teachers have a full schedule of one AP class, and if more sections are needed, other teachers take it on.</p>
<p>There is no “grade inflation” in AP courses, but the grade is weighted for the cum, as are honors course grades. </p>
<p>Students do pay for their AP exams, and almost all take them. The teachers tend to publicize how their classes (not individual students) do on the exam, and 4s and 5s seem to be pretty usual, along with some 3s. I think 2s are rare. The teachers use AP exam-type questions throughout the courses. These kids are really prepared well. My D got a “5” on AP calc AB and she is not a math person.</p>
<p>AP exams here are $82…DD just told me today I have to send a check into school. Students at our school are recommended for AP courses by their teachers BUT the students can go directly to the AP instructor and get permission to enroll. That is what DS did for AP modern european history. His teacher didn’t recommend him, the GC would NOT intervene, but the AP teacher (who had had DS in another course) said he was welcome to enroll. Students taking AP classes are required to take the exam as part of the course expectation.</p>
<p>I am always AMAZED that some schools have unlimited open enrollment for AP classes! </p>
<p>From many years experience, including interviewing for an Ivy for a long, long time, I think it just waters down the class. Sorry, except for truly exceptional cases like math whizzes, I do not think that the average tenth grader taking an AP class - especially in the humanities - is really doing college level work - way, way too many years of college teaching experience have shown me that. </p>
<p>This “watering down” by letting everyone in is why so many top schools will only except CERTAIN APs, and only if you get a 5 (or some cases a four). In many top schools, BEFORE you even get that credit, you must prove yourself by passing other courses. For example, my son did not get his AP calculus credit until he had passed a higher level calculus courses at the college. Same with English.</p>
<p>When I was doing my Ivy admissions work, I was told that before junior year, APs were looked at askance unless the kid got a 5 on the exam. The preferred way to go (again, except for certain high IQ geniuses who can handle, say, AP Physics and AP Calc at an early age), I was told, was 2/3 junior year APs and 2/3 senior year APs. </p>
<p>Our town’s high school regularly gets kids into the Ivies, MIT, top ten LACs, etc, with an average of FIVE AP courses! That is also due to the fact that the regular courses are in most cases as hard as or harder than the AP courses.</p>
<p>In addition, I must have read a dozen times that not only my Ivy, but many schools, look only at CERTAIN APs - namely US History, the sciences (but not Env. Sci), calculus, English, and languages. The rest are considered “fluff” and that included Psych and even non US History.</p>
<p>Since many state schools accept these courses for credit, then of course for the student who goes there they are not considered fluff.</p>
<p>The best schools did it right: you were required to meet certain standards to get into the class- so that the class was taught at a certain level - AND required to take the exam.</p>
<p>It should not be a matter of age or grade but of preparation. My S found that his CTY classes prepared him very well for APs in Physics and Chemistry. Despite his high SAT-verbal in 7th grade, I’m glad that he’s waited until junior year to take APs in the humanities, however, as I think that it takes a certain amount of maturity, not just brain power, to do well in such courses (I’m not talking grades only). But I have heard of schools that use SAT scores to place 9th and 10th graders into AP courses. If the students achieve the national average score, they are placed into AP classes.</p>
<p>marite and others - agreed that not all AP classes are “enriched.” In fact, S is very strong in history/government - really likes to grapple with the issues. His jr. history teacher recommended that he NOT take AP govt. as, in his opinion, it was very much “taught to the test” by the particular teacher and not a thinking-persons course. So each decision should be case by case, I’m thinking.</p>
<p>Still not sure why it shouldn’t be student’s option to take or not take the test at the end.</p>
<p>Nedad…I agree that average 10th graders, who aren’t wanting to work on a college level, will water down an AP class. But at my school at least, I saw that “average” students didn’t even try to take APs. Open enrollment at my school was never a problem because it was complete self selection; AP classes were taught with a college workload from day 1, so in the rare event that someone who didn’t belong (or want to belong) took one, they’d drop it in about 1 week and transfer to the honors calc, english etc. This self selection is what kept the average scores of many of the AP tests at 5 and the others at 4-5.</p>
<p>In our HS only juniors and seniors can take AP’s, with very few exceptions for very talented math students. And admission to many of the AP’s is by exam, along with prior grades and teacher recommendations. You cannot take any science AP without having completed Bio, CHem and Physics…and to take AP Physics you must be in the BC Calc class. Only a limited amount of AP’s are offered and up until this year the only courses offered to juniors were AP US History and AP Statistics. Seniors could choose amongst the AP hard sciences, AP English, AP AB/BC Calc, AP Stat, AP foreign language and several AP history courses. I guess theoretically the most anyone could take prior to graduation would be 8…2 junior year and up to 6 senior year, though I know few who ever did that. It’s an ongoing debate here about whether it’s really worth it. Might we not be better off creating a challenging seminar type curriculum in subjects the teachers are qualified in and passionate about, rather than a standardized AP curriculum. BTW, all students taking AP classes must sign a contract (co-signed by a parent) affirming that they will take the course until the end and sit for the actual AP exam.</p>
<p>AP courses are limited to certain grade levels, e.g., AP Calculus can be taken only by seniors unless a student has taken the prerequisite courses perhaps during summer school. There are three levels for some of the “majors” (math, sciences)–AP, honors, and regular, so kids can enroll in the AP version of those classes. In the past, you had to be recommended for AP classes. The administration and faculty investigated what would happen if kids self-selected and discovered that kids, who probably would not have been recommended for an AP class, worked even harder when they did take an AP class and succeeded. Class size is capped, and extra sections are added if possible.</p>
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<p>Isn’t it great when this happens?<br>
Our school seems to have a fair number of students who take BC Calc either as sophomores or seniors. Some were advanced in 7th and 8th grades; some have taken summer math courses. Many other schools seem to be in the same situation. I once was told that, out of 83 students enrolled in Multivariable Calculus at the Harvard Extension School, 53 were high schoolers.</p>
<p>At our HS only juniors and seniors can take AP’s until this fall when they are adding AP US History for sophomores. Many kids just take 2 to three ap classes. To get into an AP class you have to have a B or above in the pre-requiste class before it, get a rec signed by the pre-rec class teacher and sign a contract that you will do summer reading or in the case of math, quite a bit of problems. That does a pretty good job of weeding out the slackers.</p>
<p>I neglected to add that, as part of the three levels of courses, AP classes are offered for all four years, but you need to complete the prerequisite courses in order to take them. Freshman can take AP Math 1, sophomores can take AP Math 2 as long as they’ve completed the AP Math 1 work (either the class or during summer school), juniors can take AP US History, seniors can take AP US Government, etc.</p>
<p>There is not a huge offering of AP classes therefore you must take prereq courses(Honors) and score no less than a B+ to qualify to take AP classes. All of them require quite a bit of summer work. 3-4 books with 5 page papers, multiple readings, etc. You need to have a teacher’s sign off during registration. I think this method retains the quality of the courses and not just to look good on an app. All students who take AP’s are required to take the test. Just wrote the check.</p>