<p>AP classes are full of crap. They’re slow, teach you a bunch of things irrelevant to the topic, and create unnecessary burden to learning. In public education, most teachers don’t care at all about teaching quality. This makes AP classes an excellent demonstration of willingness to undergo tribulation and therefore good for college apps. Also, you get to skip a bunch of undergraduate coursework that doesn’t contribute much to the rest of your life.</p>
<p>Anyone who does it “because it’s interesting/challenging” is lying because the challenge of AP courses are nowhere near the level of actually helping students perform publishable research. Such students would benefit more from self-studying and pursuing undergraduate level topics, performing research, and winning national competitions. Realistically, a yearlong AP course is equivalent to a quarter/semester of undergraduate level work, which have lower priority than resume-building activities such as UROPS, volunteering, etc.</p>
<p>If you couldn’t tell already, I take AP courses for college apps but spend most of my time dissipating.</p>
<p>@tangentline what major are you doing and at which uni? Collegeboard doesn’t offer math/science classes beyond freshman topics so this seems difficult to believe.</p>