Best and Worst schools for AP/IB credit

[ucbalumnus]

@Ynotgo

I guess if you want the stingy end, that would be Caltech. They give zero AP credit and basically no credit for courses at other colleges.

How does Caltech handle transfer students (who theoretically can exist, due to the existence of 3+2 agreements with some LACs )?

[traveler98]

@Ynotgo, to the original point of this thread, did you ever feel misled by Caltech regarding its AP policy? To me, the only problem with schools awarding low or no AP credit is if they misrepresent their policy to prospective students.

[Ynotgo]

@traveler98 No we never felt misled about their AP policy. I don’t recall if it was mentioned at the info session we attended (probably was), but their website clearly states:

Please note that we do not grant credit for AP, IB, A Level, Pre-U, or college courses taken prior to enrollment. Each student accepted to Caltech will take a math and physics placement exam prior to enrolling. Based on the results of these exams, you may place out of courses and be granted credit for those courses.

@ucbalumnus I don’t know about how the 3+2 agreements work or how many people complete the requirements. I know that they only accepted one transfer for this fall and a few more than that previous years. Transfer applicants must take a “Caltech Transfer Entrance Examination” in both mathematics and physics," The sample test says that it covers:

Physics:
Newtonian mechanics (motion, vectors, trajectories, Newton’s laws, forces), work and energy, energy conservation, momentum, rigid rotations, angular momentum, harmonic motion, resonance, gravity, Kepler orbits, ellipses, electric fields and potentials, Gauss’s Law, current resistance, capacitance, inductance, magnetic fields, Faraday’s law, AC and DC circuits, and special relativity.

Math:
Basic calculus, Taylor polynomials, series, linear algebra (systems of equations, vectors and matrices, determinants, vector spaces, transformations, eigenvalues), vector calculus (multiple integrals, line and path integrals, theorems of Green and Stokes), and differential equations.

[moooop]

Michigan State gives you 16 credits for scoring a 5 on a foreign language AP test. That’s pretty generous.

[PurpleTitan]

UIUC gives a max of 20 credit hours each for both AP Chinese and AP Japanese.

That is the most generous I’ve seen for any AP test.

The UC’s and UW-Madison give credit for 3’s on all AP tests.

[ucbalumnus]

@PurpleTitan

The UC’s and UW-Madison give credit for 3’s on all AP tests.

However, subject credit and advanced placement may require a minimum of 4 or 5, or may not be given at all.

Also, note that there may be a policy that if the student takes a college course duplicating the content behind an AP score, the AP credit will be removed. So a student who gets AP credit for calculus AB but takes calculus 1 in college may lose the AP credit for calculus AB.