<p>I saw a thread recently in which a student was asking about the usefulness of AP tests. One statement in that thread was that AP tests have no role in admissions, and I was sure that overstated the case, so I looked up some college admission forms (often, supplements to the Common Application) that have spaces for students to self-report AP test scores. Here are some links to such forms. </p>
<p>I checked some other college Web sites, and on those sites the forms were either unavailable on this date or mentioned nothing about AP scores. It appears to mostly be the “usual suspects,” the colleges that are hard to get into with perfect high school grade point averages, that care about AP test scores.</p>
<p>I don’t think the AP’s have “no role in admissions.” I hear repeatedly this: if the h.s. offers AP’s, the hard-to-acquire unis/colleges seek students who take some or many of those courses, to demonstrate the student takes advantage of the resources around him/herself. Resourcefulness and hard work are qualities desirable in a college student. AP’s are one way to demonstrate that, not the only way.</p>
<p>Don’t most h.s. transcripts also indicate how many AP’s are offered in the high school? So presumably that comparison takes place between the two documents. </p>
<p>As well, the counselor ticks off whether the student took the “most rigorous possible” or “somewhat rigorous” workload for that high school.</p>
<p>I’m retired from the admissions game, FINALLY (it’s been a decade). If, for example, my youngest kid applied to Harvard (which he didn’t), he’d also have nothing to enter in for the application’s requested “Class Rank.” He was rankless (although sometimes he rankled me!) because he skipped 11th grade, so the H.S. could not rank him at all. </p>
<p>I’m not here to defend the admissions processes, however. I just don’t think having an entry spot on the application is anything more than tidy housekeeping. I believe, based on the assembled classes I saw at my S’s school (a top LAC) that he, along with others, was admitted despite having only 2 AP courses to take in his entire h.s. So he “maxed out” on that opportunity and made his admissions case in other areas. It was not held against him that his h.s. had such a limited offering. That much I know for sure.</p>
<p>Actually, my guess is that the colleges are providing a space to report the scores because students were reporting them anyway - but not knowing where to put the scores. The spot on the form isn’t mandatory - so students should report only those scores they want the college to know about – 4’s & 5’s for the top colleges.</p>
<p>One thread I saw on the Harvard Forum a few months ago by an admitted member of Harvard class of '11 said he heard from a Harvard admission officer who visited his high school that an applicant should report ALL applicable scores, that is all scores asked for in application questions. He said that cherry-picking which scores to self-report was viewed as dishonest and was more harmful to an application than simply listing, say, a few low scores along with higher scores. There are recent threads in various college forums that seem to give the same picture of the admission process: admission officers sometimes admit students with low scores who have other desirable characteristics, but they are quite annoyed by students who aren’t forthcoming. </p>
<p>originally written as a reply to a thread here on College Confidential, detailing how context matters when looking at how many AP scores a college applicant has.</p>
<p>I don’t know about Harvard, but since the school has no way of knowing which exams have been taken, I don’t know how they can tell if they have been cherry-picked. My d’s college applications all seemed to ask for both SAT & ACT scores, but as she had decided for strategic reasons to report ACT’s only, that is what she did – and it didn’t seem to hurt at all. Students are not required to fill out all parts of an application – for example, if there is a section that says “employment” and the kid has never had paying job, they can leave it blank; same for “honors & awards”.</p>
<p>Depending on a school’s AP policy, it doesn’t make sense to report lower scores. That is, if credit will be awarded only for a 4, why report a 3 to the college? It seems to me that it is theoretically valuable for a college to know where a student admitted will be starting when they begin college – the prospective math or physics major with a 5 on AP Calculus BC is obviously going to go into a higher math course than the kid who does not have AP credits. But if the college is using AP scores for anything other than considering award of credit or placement – then its an inappropriate use of the test scores for a purpose other than that for which it was designed.</p>
<p>I realize that high AP scores look good, which is why my daughter listed hers. She had at least a 4 on every test she took, so there was no reason not to report them all. My son had 3’s on some of his APs, but it was so many years ago that I honestly don’t remember what he did on college applications. </p>
<p>Unless and until Harvard or any other school tells its applicants that AP scores are required as part of the admission process, it is not dishonest for students to choose whether or not to report them, any more than it would be dishonest for a student to mention only the sports where he made the varsity team on his EC list, even though perhaps he had played or tried out for other sports.</p>
<p>No. But many schools have a document that gives statistical information about the school, from the AP/IB/Honors classes available to the racial make-up of the school to average SAT scores, etc.–all to give the colleges an idea of that the high school is like. Ours is called the “profile” and accompanies every recommendation that the GC writes on behalf of a student to a college.</p>
<p>Yes, usually it is the high school profile (a document sent out by the high school counselor) rather than the transcript that sets the context for what courses are available at a particular high school.</p>
<p>Here’s my whine about the “how many APs does your school offer” factor…
Not all APs are equal.
A student can take an AP like Biology, which is the equivalent of a 2 semester college course (6 hours total) PLUS 2 labs (2 more hours)…total of 8 hours.</p>
<p>Another student takes AP Psych (over the course of a year) which is the equivalent of a 1 semester, 3 hour class.</p>
<p>These APs are counted the <em>same</em> on a students transcript but are not the same in terms of challenge, time commitment, etc.</p>
<p>To make things even more convoluted, the student who took the GPA busting AP scores a “5” and the student who takes the “one semester-spread out to a whole year” AP scores a “3”. </p>
<p>But, hypothetically, if a student takes an AP course and doesn’t report any score, would the college automatically assume either the student got a 2 or 1, or perhaps didn’t take the exam at all? The AP course is on the transcript as AP-USH, or whatever, so it seems best to report all scores 3 or above (since that means Satisfactory at a college level class), lest the college wonder if it might be a 2 or 1 or no-take. And even if there’s a 2 or 1, if there are some other scores 3 and above, it still seems worth noting. Plus, that feeling of being forthcoming with information and not being “irritating” as mentioned above. Just musing here.
I can imagine an Adcom seeing a list of five AP classes, with scores noted as follows:
Course a, scored 4.<br>
Course b, scored 5.<br>
Course c, scored [blank].
Course d, scored 3.
Course e, Scored 5.</p>
<p>All I’d take away from that is: took 5 courses and doesn’t like to own up to his/her
shortcomings.</p>
<p>It’s a character thing, and I’d remember it after the scores, which are a nice display except for that blank, IMHO. At that point, listing a 1 would add credence to the 5, not detract from it.</p>
<p>^ I worried about this when my kid signed up for his first AP class. I asked son’s GC about whether it will hurt not to report an AP score. She told me that it does not play a role in admissions for the schools my son was considering. Admission criteria can be looked up for colleges one is interested in.</p>
<p>I’m sure you are correctly reporting how idiotic some high school transcripts are. But I doubt very much that any of the colleges listed in post #1 in this thread treat those AP tests the same in evaluating admission files. The college admission officers know very well about the facts you report on AP courses differing in difficulty.</p>
<p>At our hs, biology is taught over THREE years. D took Bio 1 & AP Bio 2, but didn’t take AP Bio 3. So she didn’t take the AP Bio test, since she didn’t take AP Bio 3. She had AP Bio on her transcript, but no test score. Didn’t seem to have an effect on her admissions results. </p>
<p>At our local high school, most of the AP tests that kids take are loaded into the back end of the senior year–too late for admissions, but in good time for college credit or placement. </p>
<p>If you want to show subject knowledge, you can always take the SAT 2 test in the subject.</p>
<p>I’d note that I checked the supplements tokenadult refers to, and Cal Tech & Yale clearly request the AP scores in a section marked “Optional”. Harvard is more ambiguous, but it’s instructions start with the phrase, “College Board Advanced Placement Tests are not required for admission…” so i think it would be reasonable to interpret it as an optional question. </p>
<p>There are a lot of reasons why a student might not take every AP exam that corresponds to the courses they have taken. The $85 cost is one of them – I can see a lot of parents placing a limit on how many they will pay for. So I think it would be very inappropriate for a college to draw conclusions from the absence of an AP score. </p>
<p>I’d also note that of the two AP scores my daughter had available to report at the time of her application, only one corresponded to a course she had taken – the other was a course she self-studied for. When it comes to self-study, it seems to me that it is very much in the student’s interest to report a high score but they should not feel in any way “dishonest” for failing to report a lower score in a test of a subject they didn’t take in school.</p>
<p>tokenadult,
It wasn’t the transcript (which just shows grades) but the counselor’s evaluation/school profile. Within the context of my son’s school (which offers 20-something APs), he didn’t take the most rigorous schedule, which HURTS if you want to get into the most selective schools. They went strictly by the numbers, and if you took at least one AP from every discipline. Since he didn’t take AP Latin (his foreign language) his wasn’t considered the most rigorous. He would have been much better off, under their scheme, taking AP Latin instead of AP Bio or Calc.</p>
<p>And I have a hard time believing that admissions is going to look <em>beyond</em> what the school puts on it’s profile/eval.</p>
<p>I guess it probably helped my sons to report their AP scores, then.</p>
<p>Columbia–at least when my S filled out the app, did not ask for them. So, our assumption is this is not an important point for them in admissions.</p>
<p>I dont’ want to get into this debate again, but there are lots of high schools where kids have no idea that taking or not taking the test is considered to be a big deal. Mine only did if they thought there was a reason to need the credit. Many times there wasn’t. So, they didn’t always take them. </p>
<p>Maybe they shoulda known better, shoulda known that colleges would judge them harshly for not taking them, or not reporting them. Luckily, though, they somehow stumbled into some dang good schools which somehow didn’t seem to care!</p>
<p><a href=“tokenadult:”>quote</a>
Harvard admission officer who visited his high school [said] that an applicant should report ALL applicable scores, that is all scores asked for in application questions. He said that cherry-picking which scores to self-report was viewed as dishonest and was more harmful to an application than simply listing, say, a few low scores along with higher scores.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Note that this directly contradicts the idea (which you have posted many times) that Harvard is interested only in the highest SAT scores, because it merely “superscores” the SAT and the other scores may as well not exist.</p>
<p>To answer calmom’s question as to how such a situation could arise, suppose that an applicant took SAT-I, got low scores and submits a higher ACT score in lieu of the SAT-I, without reporting the SAT-I results on the application (since ACT is standing in for those). The problem is that Harvard also requires SAT-II subject tests, and the SAT-I results are included on the score report. So they would discover the unreported scores.</p>
<p>If Harvard were interested only in one’s highest scores, and they certainly have a conversion of ACT to SAT that they use, this “deception” wouldn’t matter, since the lower scores might as well not exist. But it does matter. </p>
<p>Harvard indicates at the college representative meetings (among other places) that it is interested in as much information as possible. It is the least likely school in the United States to pre-empt any piece of information, such as the lower test scores, from ever entering into consideration.</p>
<p>By the way, the strategic implication of the above is that applicants who might have low SAT can avoid this problem by taking ACT first (many times, if they think it helps). They can then opt out of ever taking SAT-I if the scores are high, and submit a clean SAT-II report.</p>
<p>I don’t think that Tokenadult’s and siserune’s reasonings need be at odds as they apply to very different things.</p>
<p>It is indeed possible for Harvard to consider only the best SAT scores (and indeed, many colleges claim to do so, not just Harvard).</p>
<p>Unlike the SAT exam, which can be taken multiple times, AP exams are only taken once for any particular subject. So it is indeed reasonable for a college to want to know how a student did in every AP subject the student took. For a student to list AP courses on his or her transcript but not AP scores (if taken before senior year) might lead to speculation as to the worth of the class or the performance of the student on the AP exam. If the student list only the good AP scores, that, too, might lead to speculation that the scores were less than stellar. The only way that a student could avoid listing low AP scores without giving rise to negative speculation is if the exams were self-studied for.</p>
<p>That’s assuming that the Harvard officer referred exclusively to AP tests (or non-SAT’s). Otherwise, there is an apparent contradiction with tokenadult’s interpretation. If a link is posted to the thread of a few months ago, we can take a closer look. There is an ongoing thread to which I posted a day or two ago where the same issue came up with similar remarks from an admissions dean at Cornell.</p>
<p>Edit: here is the link to the other thread. The Cornell remarks are reported as unambiguously pertaining to SAT/ACT, as distinguished from further remarks of the same nature about AP.</p>
<p><a href=“marite:”>quote</a>
It is indeed possible for Harvard to consider only the best SAT scores (and indeed, many colleges claim to do so, not just Harvard).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The question at issue was not whether Harvard uses the highest scores (like almost all colleges, it states that it does) but whether an applicant is guaranteed that the lowest scores may as well have never existed. </p>
<p>That is, will an application, no matter the information on the SAT score report or other data elsewhere in the application, always be treated identically to the same application but with the SAT history replaced by a single SAT score equal to the “superscore” of the report?</p>
<p>There are few if any schools that have claimed to pre-empt consideration of the lower scores. For Harvard in particular it would certainly be out of character. They are quite interested in exceptionally high SAT scores, for example, as internal studies show those to be correlated with magna and summa degrees. There is quite a difference between getting a 2350 on the SAT in one sitting in the second year of high school, and scratching and clawing one’s way upward from a 2050 to a superscored (not single sittingg) 2350 over five tests and two years. I assume admissions is aware of that.</p>