<p>I hear different things about this. Am I right in that some publics give college credit for AP courses taken in high school, but LAC’s for instance, wouldn’t?</p>
<p>Varies from school to school – you should be able to find the info on websites.</p>
<p>the following is true for both public and privates: check with the individual school. The information is usually available on their website. Each school has different standards as far as what scores on the AP tests will count for what, or if anything. My D’s small, selective LAC takes all five of her APs and gives her credit toward her gen ed requirements. But it depended on the score.</p>
<p>It varies SO widely. Make a list of the possible schools and check their websites. Just when you know what is common, you find a school that is different. For example, lots of schools require a 5 on AP PSych to get any credit. Then I looked at the web site of a pretty good school and they give 6 hours of credit with a 3, 4 or 5. Hard to figure out. </p>
<p>While you’re on the web site, look at what else you can get credit for. For example, at Texas Tech, you can get 3 hours of English credit for at least a 610 on the CR and Writing portions of the SAT; you can get 6 hours with 700s! Some schools are VERY generous, so if getting out early is a priority, it helps to study the web sites.</p>
<p>Some colleges will accept CLEP tests, too.</p>
<p>We found it varied all over the lot, from schools which limit the total credits, to those that will take unlimited amounts. My S at Columbia is limited to 16 credits from AP. Another friend’s S at CMU got enough credits to get Soph status immediately. College Board has a link to the schools’ AP policies.</p>
<p>When you look at the AP policies of various colleges, you will see that they vary greatly from college to college, and sometimes from department to department within a college, in terms of</p>
<ol>
<li>Credit toward graduation</li>
<li>Advanced placement (i.e., whether you can skip the introductory course and take something more advanced)</li>
<li>Exemption from requirements (i.e., whether the AP credit counts toward a distribution requirement)</li>
<li>How high a score on the AP test you need in order to get any or all of the above</li>
</ol>
<p>For example, at the University of Maryland, my son’s score of 4 on the AP Psychology test gave him 3 credits, allowed him to take courses for which Introductory Psychology is a prerequisite, and fulfilled one distribution requirement in the social and behavioral sciences. These things would apply no matter what college within the university he belonged to.</p>
<p>In contrast, at Cornell University, which my daughter attends, AP policies vary from college to college within the university. In the College of Arts and Sciences, you cannot fulfill ANY distribution requirements with APs. My daughter has 6 AP credits in economics, 3 in government, and 4 in history, and she STILL has to take courses to meet a distribution requirement in social and behavioral sciences. But Cornell students can often get credit for graduation for APs (although this is meaningless beyond 20 credits, because only 20 credits outside of the College of Arts and Sciences can be counted toward the 120 required for graduation), and they can get exempted from introductory courses and requirements within their majors. My daughter was able to get exempted from all three of the prerequisites for her major. If she had wanted to, she could have declared her major the day she arrived for orientation.</p>
<p>And then there are places that are way stricter than Cornell…</p>
<p>DS had already taken two tests junior year. For senior year, we researched the policies for most of the schools to which he was applying, only one of which was a public, and made decisions based on that info - in the end he only skipped one AP and took six altogether. His scores (all 5’s blush) gave him “transfer credit” for nine classes, some of which counted towards his major, some for other (liberal arts) credit, and some for general graduation credits.</p>
<p>The credits didn’t actually place him in sophomore status, however; according to my son’s freshman advisor at CMU:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That was in the SCS; maybe other schools had a different policy.</p>
<p>Right, my S took 20 hours of AP credits to our big state u. and became a sophmore after his first semester. Besides being able to regiater earlier for classes, he thought the biggest perk was that he got higher priority for an on-campus parking sticker the next year!</p>