I am currently a junior and have opted in doing online school for the remainder of this year. Since I don’t attend public school anymore, I can’t figure out how I will be paying for the cost of six AP exams this year. Besides advanced placement courses, I also take dual credit courses with a local university. As of right now, my parents can’t afford to let me take any AP exams this year. If it really came down to it, how will college admission officers view my decision in not taking AP exams? Will they assume that I was just lazy and didn’t want to take them? How will it look if I had a bunch of AP classes on my sophomore and junior transcript but no AP exam scores?
Will these colleges care about submitting AP exam scores on the common app:
Middlebury
Wellesley
Wesleyan
Emory
Rice
Barnard
Bates
Williams
Oberlin
Amherst
Yale
Cornell
Dartmouth
Penn State
Stanford
Swarthmore
William and Mary
Harvard
Upenn
Columbia
Princeton
I don’t know about how colleges will view this, but I do know that it is possible to raise the money on your own. You can get a part-time job (if you’re over 14, well in Pennsylvania anyway), you can do car-washes, lemonade stand (i suppose when it gets hot in the spring, depending on where you live), and other things like that.
Not sure about how colleges will view either, however in addition to the suggestion by @raventhemage you can also teach kids in your school/neighborhood. It may be possible to find kids to tutor in either High/Junior High or Elementary school and save the money to be able to pay the AP fees. Tutoring would allow you to manage your schedule. How many exams are you planning to take and what were the expected fees. You may be able to cover those with tutoring help on the side unless you do not have any time due to other things you have to do for the family.
How did you pay last year? Were you eligible for a fee waiver? The rules for waivers are available here:
Even if you are not enrolled in a brick&mortar school, you still need a school to administer your tests, unless the online school is finding a test site for you? If you do not have a test site yet, you should work on that immediately after Christmas break! Not only do you need them to order your tests and save a spot for you for the exams, but process any fee waiver you qualify for.
If you do not find a way to take the tests, just explain what happened on your application. Obviously, an AP class backed up by a test score would be better, but at least you took the most challenging courses you could.