Brown and AP Exams

B01090
Sat, 01 Apr 2017 17:50:41 +0000

Don’t take lit, stats, micro, or macro. You will get nothing for them at Brown. Save yourself the money and stress studying.

As a word of general advice for AP Exams at Brown, very rarely does it benefit you to take the exams senior year.

One major exception would be AP Calc AB or BC, they’ll get you transcript notation for Brown Calculus I (AB) or I and II (BC), but not Brown credit (they’ll show up as 0.0 credits and won’t count towards your required 30 credits to graduate).

Even exams like AP Chemistry or AP Biology, which place you out of their equivalents at Brown (CHEM 0100 and BIOL 0200 respectively) and into the higher level courses (CHEM 0330 and any mid-level biology class with BIOL 0200 as a prerequisite, respectively), you can take placement tests online in August which are a joke–way easier than the AP and I think you only need 50% on the biology placement exam if they haven’t changed it since I took it. All multiple choice too.

Most other AP exams either get you nothing or allow you to place into a higher level course. But placement into courses at Brown is very relaxed anyway–the professor’s mentality is usually "if you think you’re prepared, then go ahead.

Again, AP or IB exams (or other foreign equivalents) will never never never get you Brown credit, meaning no matter how many 5’s you get on AP exams, you still need to take and pass 30 classes to graduate from Brown. Yes, they might get you placement, but that placement is very easy to obtain in other ways anyway. Some AP exams will give you an “unassigned credit” (a misnomer; they are still 0.0 credits) in the respective Brown department but these are basically useless and most concentration advisors won’t let you use them anyway.

Hope this all makes sense!