<p>We cannot know, can we? We can only surmise. </p>
<p>I expect that my S high SAT score in 10th grade impressed the adcom and was instrumental in his admission. But there is no way of knowing whether he displaced some other applicant who got the same score after several tries, early in his senior year.
But anyway, this thread was not about SATs, it was about APs. And AP scores must be treated differently from SAT scores.<br>
Apples and oranges tend to go into different recipes.</p>
<p>There are two different issues in dealing with APs, which have gotten a bit confused on this thread:</p>
<p>1) Does it matter for admissions if a student takes courses designated AP? The answer is clearly yes, since schools are looking for the “hardest curriculum”. That’s where the high school report comes in - it shows which APs were available to the student.</p>
<p>2) Do the AP test scores hold particular weight in the admissions process? For many schools, I believe the answer is no - they may be considered but they are not necessarily a deciding factor. The fact that even the schools that do ask for them on the supplement do not require an official AP score report from the College Board indicates to me that AP scores do not carry much weight. (And no, many high schools, such as my d’s, do not record AP scores on the transcript, although they do designate AP courses.)</p>
<p>Indeed, maybe the offense taken at not reporting low scores comes from the admission office noticing that the student doesn’t believe Harvard’s repeated statements on this subject. The statements that Harvard “considers only your best scores” (that is Harvard’s statement, in writing in the view book) could very well be consistent with a desire to get a full report of AP scores. The exact viewbook statement this year is </p>
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<p>Strictly speaking, because AP tests are not required in quite the same way as SAT I/ACT scores and SAT II scores, the statement by the Harvard class of '11 student that I have passed on (which I have not found in writing from the keyboards of the Harvard admission office) is fully consistent with the statement by the admission office in the Harvard viewbook. But it seems to me a perfectly rational admission office policy to try to obtain the most complete picture possible of an applicant’s academic performance (including but definitely not limited to test-taking) while construing each instance of score scatter in light of the HIGHEST scores a student has obtained in the case of retakes. </p>
<p>There are abundant opportunities for parents to meet college admission officers, not only in the cities where the colleges are located but all over the country, </p>
<p>and one thing I highly recommend to parents who are curious about these issues is meeting the admission officers in person at public meetings, as I have repeatedly done, and asking them about whatever issue you are curious about in the presence of other parents, where vocal clues such as hesitation or immediate response and body language clues make possible a better nuanced interpretation of the official answer, as does the interactive nature of the public discussion.</p>
<p>I do not know of high school transcripts that list AP scores–there may be, but AP scores are received in July, well after final grades have been computed. I realize that at SOME schools, AP scores are incorporated into the final grade, but these are a minority of schools. I know for certain that our school does not list AP scores.</p>
<p>I believe that only some colleges ask for AP scores. And if they ask, they must certainly take them into consideration–otherwise why even ask for them? I’d be extremely surprised if the 20 AP scores (15 5s and 5 4s, 8 of those in his junior year) that a friend of my S received played no role in his admission.</p>
<p>Then, of course, there are the courses that are NOT labeled AP at a high school because they cover more than the AP curriculum and/or are taught in one semester instead of two…and they are not labeled AP on the transcript!</p>
<p>Yet another reason to include the course descriptions in certain circumstances…</p>
<p>marite, I think that anything that sets a student apart from the pack has an impact on admissions. Just the fact that your S’s friend took those AP classes and got those scores does set him apart. (And please note, I never said that the AP scores have “no” effect; I said they have little weight, IMO.)</p>
<p>But for the average kid on CC who takes 3 or 4 and comes on asking, “I got a 2 on one of my tests. Am I sunk”, I still think that it has little effect. Not nearly as much as the required SAT IIs, nor do good APs substitute for bad SAT IIs.</p>
<p>I can tell you that the Harvard admissions rep TOLD US at a reception that they do not care about the AP score … they only care that the course was taken if available. This was echoed at the same reception by admissions reps from Penn, Georgetown, and Duke. In addition, when asked about taking the course from a local college rather than as an AP if the AP is offered at one’s school, all 4 reps said NO — even if the teacher is awful (the reason given by the questioner as to why he might choose the college course over the AP course). </p>
<p>I imagine that a school like Harvard asks for AP scores, even though they say they don’t care about them, because everyone who got a 5 wants a place to list that fact. Or maybe because the 5 is a nice plus, but the 2 would just be ignored. If they are looking for ethical students, they would expect anything they ask for to be reported. For example, my D got sick during the ACT & had an abyssmal science score. She took the test again & did well. She never tried to hide the low score (or even to explain it), and it wasn’t held against her in admissions (even by Tufts). </p>
<p>If you think that the “only” school where you could possibly be happy is Harvard (or some other school that requires AP scores on its app) … and if you have a “low” AP score … you might want to have a back-up school in mind.</p>
<p>An important point. More generally, anybody applying to any of the colleges listed in post #1, which are all highly selective, had better think first about a good “safety” college that also offers academic challenge but additionally offers a sure bet for admission. </p>
<p>I take it that reply #27 is based on attending one of Exploring College Options sessions, which is something I did in my town. I don’t recall, at the session I attended, a question that was quite as specific about AP scores as such. But I think what post #27 reports makes sense: the main issue for the college admission officers is that high school students take a challenging academic program (that WAS said at the program I attended) and in many cases a high school AP course, even one that yields a “low” student score on an AP test, may be more academically challenging than the “same” course taught at a local (community) college. Here in Minnesota, a lot of the students in the Twin Cities suburbs mull over the choice between going to a suburban high school with a lot of AP courses or going to the state university for dual-enrollment courses under the state’s PSEO program. The highly selective colleges with a national draw admit some students of each kind each year. The main issue is not to take wimpy courses. It happens that both the male and the female AP state scholars from Minnesota in the most recent year are on their way to Harvard in the fall, but it certainly is imaginable to gain admission to Harvard from this state with fewer (or lower) AP test scores than what those students had.</p>
<p>I think we need to take what the ad reps say at info sessions together with the CB’s recently announced analysis of the whole AP program. Remember that Harvard’s Fitzsimmons is on the CB Board and has reportedly said (I paraphrase) that “with APs, what you see is not always what you get.” In other words, Fitzsimmons believes in the validating value of AP tests. </p>
<p>This does not mean that a student whose school does not offer APs is sunk at Harvard or anywhere else. Colleges do encourage students to take the most challenging curriculum *available to them". This is important to bear in mind. But when a student has a high AP course grade and a low AP score, some explanation is in order. Maybe the student was sick on the day. Maybe the teacher was lousy (but then how good an AP course was it?) In other words a low AP score will not automatically disqualify a student, but high AP scores will definitely advantage those who have them and be used to validate the AP course grade. </p>
<p>A problem with college courses is that adcoms do not know how to evaluate them. There are great and challenging college courses and some that are, charitably, not so great. Harvard has applied this belief so stringently that while it gives credit for APs, it gives no credit for any college courses taken in high school, even its own courses. In this sense, it is probably extreme; I know many other colleges give credit for college courses. But it is an illustration of the preference for APs. And by this, one means AP scores.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is more acceptable to NOT take all the AP tests if you come from the school of hard knocks. If I were a low income student who could not afford the AP tests, I’d certainly say something about it in the “anything else you want to say for yourself?” box.</p>
<p>This is a question for adcoms…if you’re looking at an application from a student who is obviously low income/hard knocks (I’m assuming this may be quite obvious from his school/background/essay/request for financial aid/etc.), would you be more lenient about him not taking the AP tests?</p>
<p>Conversely, if it’s a student who obviously grew up with a gold spoon in his mouth (gone to the finest boarding schools, trips abroad, expensive summer programs all on his folks’ dime make this obvious), are you more likely to look askance if he did not take any AP tests to go along with his AP classes?</p>
<p>calmom makes a good point.
Unfortunately, this is not the only area in life where the deck is stacked against those with limited income. Given, however, the widespread suspicion that some courses that are labeled APs are either not really up to snuff or sometimes downright bogus, more and more colleges are clamoring for validation. Here’s is a thread started by Tokenadult: </p>
The AP tests are NOT required for college admissions. Even the Harvard application that asks for them begins by stating that they are NOT required. Why should any student have to justify the fact that they didn’t do something that the college didn’t require?
What about all the middle class students who can’t afford it? I am talking about the median income kids whose parents earn around $50-$60K each year and who don’t have that sort of extra money to throw around. </p>
<p>I’m not kidding, I’m in that income bracket and when my daughter came home her senior year wanting money for 4 AP tests I balked – I told her I could pay for 2, not 4. She told me that the school required that she take the AP test for every AP class on her schedule. I told her it was a public school, that they could not require us to pay anything for school services, and to go back and tell her GC or principal that mom wouldn’t pay. It ended up that there were some funds available from the PTA or some other source to subsidize the cost, so my d. took the tests for a reduced cost – but the point is… $85 is a lot of money. </p>
<p>And what kind of supposed “need blind” system is it that forces kids to disclose on their applications the reasons they didn’t do something that the colleges explicitly state isn’t required in the first place?</p>
<p>And how is a kid supposed to know that they need to be explaining why they didn’t do what wasn’t required on their applications, in any case?</p>
<p>I was just going on what previous posters had said about some schools <em>looking</em> at whether or not you took the APs.</p>
<p>An admissions counselor at one school we were looking into said that anything reported on the application (AP scores) would be taken into consideration. The same application point blank asked what your AP scores were, under the “scores” portion.</p>
<p>No college requires that applicants have taken APs. The problem comes when applicants claim they have taken AP classes but have not taken the exam. It used to be that colleges trusted AP classes to be AP classes. It seems to be less and less the case. So this is why I believe that AP exams will be increasingly seen as validating. This is precisely the drift of Fitzsimmons’ remarks. He is not only Dean of Admissions at Harvard but he also sits on the CB Board.</p>
<p>Distrust of the worth of AP classes is not new. See</p>
<p>Applicants don’t “claim” they have taken AP classes - they enroll in the courses at their high schools and it is reported on their transcripts. The issue that the colleges are interested in is whether the student has taken the most challenging courses available at their high schools – not the comparative quality of the course work. If it was a matter of comparing quality of coursework, then the elite schools could simply go back to the days when they only took students coming from prestigious feeder schools – and forget the kids coming from typical public schools entirely. </p>
<p>In the same vein, the AP score may not reflect the student’s ability but rather the nature & scope of the course they had. This doesn’t necessarily mean that their course work was poor or unchallenging- it could be a matter of an AP teacher who simply fails to cover something that is on the test while going more in depth on other topics. My daughter did not take AP English Language in 11th grade because of her semester abroad; instead she worked out an arrangement with a different English lit teacher to self-study for the year, and she spent the year reading various works of American literature while her classmates in AP English Language focused mostly on writing and analytical skills. At the urging of her teachers, she decided to take the AP exam, and prepared by getting a review book and spending an hour going over the vocabulary and sample multiple choice questions, the night before the exam. She did better on the exam than the kids in the formal AP class because of that brief review session – it wasn’t a matter of the <em>academic</em> weakness of the course, it was simply that those kids did not get prepped well for the multiple choice part of the exam. (Yes, of course they should have been taught that material - but it wasn’t difficult stuff; it is very likely that the AP teacher did include it all within the course, but simply did not give her students an appropriate pre-exam review session).</p>
<p>So the bottom line is that the AP score doesn’t tell much about either the quality of the underlying course or the quality of the student. </p>
<p>And… as I’ve now noted several times … Harvard (and other colleges) tell their applicants that they do not require the AP exams. </p>
<p>If they want to see them, then they should say so - it would be simple enough to tell students that they will not acknowledge AP’s or weighted grades unless there are AP scores to go along with the courses reflected on the transcript.</p>
<p>I think there is a difference between not taking an AP exam and taking it and not reporting a low score. The score has some correlation to how well the student was able to handle a college level course. It should be an indicator as to how a student will perform in a challenging environment. That said, one big difference between the AP exam and the SAT is that student performance on an AP exam has a lot to do with the quality of teaching the student received. For example, in one class (AP Chemistry) my son’s teacher was on maternity leave for a few months this year. The subsitute wasn’t at the same level as the teacher and I’d bet money that the scores of the group were lower than the class that had her last year without a break. One year, the school took a big hit faculty-wise in a certain department and so did the AP scores. A student can self study, but in certain courses, particularly certain science classes, it’s going to be hard to make up for deficient teaching. Also, colleges receive all the AP scores in the end – true, the student is admitted but they will see it in the end.</p>
<p>Actually, the submission of AP scores is optional when the student matriculates, and students will only submit if they are going to benefit from the scores – that is, if their schools award credit or advanced placement based on the tests they have taken. As far as I can tell, Harvard gives AP credit only for scores of 5, and does not recognize AP for all courses – a student with 4’s on all the exams which Harvard recognizes would not qualify for AP and would have no reason to submit the scores. Having all 4’s is not bad, especially coming from a weaker high school – so it is not inconceivable that a kid who qualifies for admission to Harvard would still not have accumulated the right combination of scores and would never submit them.</p>
<p>I have to agree with calmom on this one - reporting scores is optional. Just as happens at “SAT optional” schools, the students with the strong scores report them and the ones with weaker scores (or no scores) don’t.</p>
<p>Schools do not accept a student’s word for their SAT I, SAT II or ACT scores. They do not accept a student’s word for the courses they’ve taken or for the grades they’ve received. Yet they accept the student’s word on for their AP scores, and consider them important in the admissions process? I don’t think so; it just doesn’t make sense to me. They’re already asking students to provide other official score reports. If the AP scores were important, they’d simply ask for an official AP score report of exams taken before senior year. </p>
<p>Not only is the submission of scores optional once matriculated, but any scores sent go only to that school. You could lie like a rug about AP scores, get into a particular school, and if you’re not going there, the school will never know.</p>
<p>Additionally, students can withhold AP scores from their reports (for a fee, of course). So if the Harvard admittee gets 2 5s, a 4 and a 1, and reported only the 5s on the app, he or she can send only the 5s.</p>
<p>Of course reporting scores is optional. And adcoms are free to interpret what is reported and not reported, and the labeling of courses as they wish. If you want to have the greatest possible chance of admission at some of the hardest to get into colleges, you make the strongest possible case. Nobody forces anybody to report scores, but then nobody forces anybody to apply to specific colleges that are known to have very tough criteria for admission.
Simple as that. I don’t see that there is much to argue about.</p>
<p>EDIT: Thanks to Asteriskea for starting a new thread on the CB’s audit of AP scores. It put the relationship between scores and AP courses into perspective.
For the record, I am no fan of either the AP courses or AP exams. It just so happens that at many schools, these are the most challenging courses available to students who do not want to snooze their way through 3-4 years of high school. Like most tests, AP exams favor certain types of students and certain types of preparation. And given the incredible variation among courses that are labeled APs (by the schools, not the CB), the exams, flawed as they are, are a validating tool (just as the SAT is, another flawed test in my opinion).</p>