AP question fast help please

[psywar]

@fretfulmother congrats!

DS did very well:
Biology 5
English Literature and Composition 5
European History 5
Macroeconomics 5
Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism 5
Physics C: Mechanics 5
United States Government and Politics 5

So yeah, he will qualify for advanced standing. We see two main routes:

1. Enjoy Princeton and pile on a year more of debt
2. Blaze through undergrad and get to grad sooner (he is thinking Stanford)

The problem is if you take even one class that AP scores would have waived for you for advanced standing, it appears you cannot get advance standing.

[quote]
“You forfeit the use of your AP for advanced standing if you take courses deemed equivalent to or below ones for which advanced placement was granted.”/quote

Interestingly, our son is a BSE and is thinking of ignoring all of his AP credits and taking the ISC program (http://lsi.princeton.edu/integratedscience/), both for the camaraderie and for the guaranteed lab positions. Despite this class being known as a difficult one, he figures it might actually be a GPA booster since he has all 5s in its core subjects and really should be in 200 level courses.

What to do?

Take the APs and go for advanced standing. Graduate a year earlier, save some cash and take harder, more interesting classes sooner, risking a very difficult first year as freshman in sophomore level courses.
Take the APs and go directly to 200 level courses, risking a very difficult first year as freshman in sophomore level courses. Spend four years, for they’ll college experience, take more “fun” courses, get more certificates.
Take ISC and throw away all the APs and basically repeat the classes in an interesting way with cool lab opportunities and maybe get a jump on a good GPA.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Psy

[fretfulmother]

@psywar - Congrats! Interestingly, I didn’t read that text as saying “if you take even one class ignoring your AP, then you can’t do advanced standing with the others” - it seemed to me that if you e.g. take Calculus in spite of your Calc AP, then your Calc AP itself is no longer counting toward any potential standing. So for a kid like yours (or mine ) - with so many AP credits that they easily exceed P’s maximum, it seems that forfeiting some of their credit won’t matter. Now whether it still allows all prerequisites is another matter.

As I mentioned above, I’m annoyed by the way they make you do a semester of advanced standing, which would otherwise be a good compromise. MIT let me just finish with fall semester senior year, but Princeton won’t let our kids do that - they have to do a full junior and senior year and cut into sophomore year.

Integrated Science looked really interesting to us too, but DS picked HUM instead (unlikely you could do both and a BSE, it seemed to me). Your DS seems to have enough APs that even forfeiting the science ones, he could still do advanced standing with the others if I’m interpreting correctly (though obviously I’m a layperson as well!)…

My DS is entering with (all 5s except USH, a 4):

CalcBC, Stat, CS, PhysC(both parts), Chem, Bio, USH, Euro, World, Latin.

It seems likely that he’ll just take more classes and stay all four years, but I agree that the appeal of paying for one less year would be great.

[skieurope]

@psywar

The problem is if you take even one class that AP scores would have waived for you for advanced standing, it appears you cannot get advance standing.

@fretfulmother

I didn’t read that text as saying “if you take even one class ignoring your AP, then you can’t do advanced standing with the others”

I agree with @fretfulmother Unless that one class drops the student down below the 8 units of AP credit that Princeton grants for Advanced Standing, there should be no issue.