<p>Maybe I should correct myself a bit: if you can take APs, definitely do. I just wanted to point out to you and other international students who may read this that the kind of thing you should -not- be worrying about is the case where you failed to do something you couldn’t possibly have done. I have known students from very rural areas in the American west who had gone way out of their way to end up with a resume that would have been nearly handed to them on a silver platter had they been attending a fancy private school in the North-East. And some of these students got in, not on account of the committee’s pity, but on account of its best effort at predicting how they would do if they were admitted.</p>