<p>Actual college classes are usually much more challenging (and more fun) than APs, and taking them certainly helps with admissions, but it may turn out to be surprisingly harder to get credit for them at your future school (unless you end up going to the university you took classes from).</p>
<p>What you are taking, in an AP, is the generic freshman “survey of…” class. For example, in my day I took a one semester class of “American History through Civil War” and another semester class “American History after Civil War”. They were both the exact equivs of what my sons took in APUSH. Strictly lecture, notes, test. Same with “Intro to US Government”, “Intro to Macro/Micro Economics”, “Intro to (fill in the blank)”. When I went to college, those were the tip of the iceburg, introductory, vanilla classes with anywhere from 30 to 200 people, typically taught by someone who is NOT interested in teaching it. That’s what you are getting in an AP class, or rather, that’s what you are getting <em>out of</em> taking when you go to college (if you pass the AP exam).</p>
<p>Personally, I wouldn’t mind if our hs discouraged kids from taking more than 2 AP classes per year. Since when did high school become college? High school should be high school - academically challenging, but high school with extra-curriculars, etc. Kids taking 5 AP classes at a time have no time to have a life. Plus I think that kids who only take 1 - 2 AP’s per year probably do better on the exams as they have more time to focus on those classes.</p>
<p>My son took AP Spanish & Econ, and got 5’s on both. He still has to take basic Econ in college though - we found out too late he’d have had to take both the Macro and Micro exams to get credit. I’m fine with that. He thinks he wants to be an Econ major, and I think it’s worth taking the foundation course of your major at your college, even if it’s a repeat of what he’s already learned, just to be sure you’re all on the same page. </p>
<p>BTW, I understand that many colleges will not give AP credit in your major, you must take the foundation courses at the school, probably for the “on the same page” reason I stated earlier. So some of the engineers bemoaning not being able to take Physics and other tech AP courses at the same time are probably going to have to take them again in college anyway.</p>
<p>High Schools schedule AP courses by demand and by how many teachers they have who are qualified to teach them. That said, the OP has a good point - a lot of kids taking AP Physics will also take AP Calc, so while having only 1 section of each is understandable, having them at the same time is not. Also, doing pre-work over the summer and then being denied the class seems blatantly unfair. (As for BC Calculus, our hs only offered it as distance learning - my friend’s son had it in his schedule, but he took it on-line in the library).</p>
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<p>This was not our experience. Our kids had plenty of time to have a “life”, and did very well on the tests, as did many of their peers with similar schedules.</p>
<p>My county sucks, it is trying to force all schools to force students, even those who are not ready, into AP classes. It is quite a sad attempt to raise the reputations of all the schools for the much criticized “Newsweek Top 1000 high schools in America.” </p>
<p>Yes, high schools do play the AP game. I’m very disappointed that what was once seen as an opportunity for the most hardworking students has devolved into nothing more than an opportunity to further a school’s reputation, and so I imagine my school, which has an unbelievable amount of APs taken each year, will now have only about 40% passing grades.</p>
<p>I am the AP Coordinator at a small private high school. I am also involved with schedule creation at the beginning of the year. </p>
<p>It is a nightmare coming up with a schedule that meets everyone’s demands. Priorities are given to making sure we have 1 option per hour for seniors that is AP or mandatory academic and 1 option per hour for seniors that is college prep but not intense (those wonderful A-G course lists have to have a few more options than just APs). At the same time, each hour needs 1 AP or mandatory academic for juniors and 1 non-intense college prep for juniors per hour. Sounds difficult, hunh? Well then try to schedule the rest of the
7th-12th grade classes using some of these same teachers! It’s a nightmare. We’re lucky if we come up with a compromise that might require athletes to miss a practice once a week to attend an AP Chem Lab. We don’t sit there and say, “How can I make this particular student’s schedule an impossibility?” It just doesn’t enter the equation. We’re worried about giving the teacher a full-time class load, offering a selection of classes for each class hour, having math teachers teach math and not English or history because that’s where it fits in the schedule and they need a class. </p>
<p>Lastly, someone mentioned that there is a lack of qualified AP teachers. Amen! There is! You can’t take someone who has a bachelors’ degree with no advanced study to teach a bachelor level class. Ideally, they should have a little bit a graduate work under their belts, if not a masters or doctorate degree. Then you add to the fact that people well-qualified to teach AP math and sciences classes can work in industry or even high education for 6-digits salaries–it’s no wonder your school can only offer 1 section of each of those classes! You wouldn’t want to take an AP and be taught by an unqualified teacher, causing you to not feel confident enough to take the test (a no-no in adcoms’ eyes) or taking the test and scoring miserably low.</p>
<p>The only question I have, is why did you wait so long to take Bio? It’s usually taken in 9th (non-AP) or 10th (AP) before you start the chem and AP chem sequence. Likewise, provided the schedule allowed it, you could have taken AP Physics last year if you were in AP Calc A/B at the same time.</p>
<p>I hope I’ve been able to give you some insight into the administration’s woes of scheduling. Keep in mind that we’re here to serve the students while not going over budgets and while meeting 50 other requirements at the same time. If you were to ask your school’s administrator, I’m sure s/he would commisserate and explain some of the same issues. It’s not a personal attack on you and your collegiate hopes. Look into taking the class online or even contact the teacher of the class and see if you can pay them to teach you the class outside of school hours in a paid tutoring session. (Most teachers enjoy teaching students who want to learn, and they can also use extra cash.)</p>
<p>It’sGr82BeAGator: Re: “My county sucks…”</p>
<p>Welcome to the machine–our HS is one of those top schools on Newsweek’s list. What you describe happened here years ago. You can justifiably blame the magazine for the ludicrous way they use AP’s in their formula. It has prompted many schools to follow this trend to (IMO) artificially move up in the rankings. (I think they’re in collusion with the College Board! Maybe they get kickbacks? Taking 7 AP’s here will cost you $602, and chances are you will not be saving (even though they market AP that way) anything on credits if you attend a top school! The system is practically criminal…LOL.)</p>
<p>AP’s in and of themselves do not necessarily elevate the quality of the education. My D would rather take an interesting elective, but ends up saddled with a ridiculous number of AP’s. And she has to stay competitve in her school or else she’ll get killed in the admissions process. IMO, this system turns some kids (not all, but some) into soulless grade-grubbing robots. </p>
<p>Kids at our HS who enroll in AP but cannot hack it have roughly 3 weeks to move down to the honors level without penalty. If you stay with it–it is mandatory that you sit for the exam.</p>
<p>avcastner: thank you for illuminating the difficult task of scheduling. HS’s vary widely in their approaches regarding sequencing and prereqs. At our HS, accelerated students take Honors Bio in 9th & Honors Chem in 10th. Both are prereqs for AP science classes. In 11th you can take any/as many AP sciences as you wish–AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Env Sci, AP Physics B (each with a separate lab section)concurrently with Honors Precalc. Likewise in 12th with the addition of AP Physics C concurrently with AP Calc AB or BC.</p>
<p>avcastner,</p>
<p>Thanks for the post. For schools that do offer a ton of AP classes, I am curious about the following. If you get back to this thread again, it would be interesting to hear from a counselors perspective…</p>
<p>Does your school (or schools you are familiar with) encourage students to take as many APs as possible?
Do schools care about final scores?
Do schools stock their AP classes with only the best and brightest, even though other students are college bound as well?
Do schools offer more classes in particular AP subjects or encourage more students to sign up for particular courses, because they have better AP test score success?
Does your school label a student’s coursework as rigorous or not rigorous based on the number of AP classes? If so, is there a distinction between different APs (those that cover two college semesters vs. those that cover one)?
In other words, what has been the impact of APs on how students select their courses, how guidance counselors guide, and how schools decide what to and what not to offer and to whom?</p>
<p>At our school (the OP was about a friend’s son- different school), the AP classes are scheduled first. They are only one period long, not matter what, so I think that probably gives a little more breathing room. </p>
<p>The interesting thing is, AP Chem, Bio, and Physics only take up one period of each day, yet those are the APs with the best scores. The years my kids were there, they took pride in being the only classes, along with the AP Calc classes, to score straight 5s.</p>
<p>My son took Physics B concurrently with Precalc, and Physics C concurrently with AP Calc. He didn’t have any problems; his physics teacher had to give some “mini tutorials” in calc topics along the way, though. He had phenomenal teachers (for both Bio and Physics) who availed themselves to students on a walk-in basis before and after school!</p>
<p>Typically students in our school will not end up with more than two science APs. They take Bio or Honors Bio in 9th grade (it’s VERY rare for a 9th grader to be ready for something as rigorous as AP Bio); Chem or Honors Chem in 10th grade; then they go back and take either class as an AP in 11th, then AP Physics in 12th (after they’ve had the requisite math).</p>
<p>Avcastner, in our school AP Bio is only very rarely taken by sophomores. Honors students take Bio in 8th and usually don’t take AP Bio until they are juniors after a year of Chemistry and Physics. Kids who didn’t get to be in the Bio class in 8th grade, often take Earth Science in 9th and don’t take AP Bio until they are seniors. </p>
<p>I do understand that scheduling is a nightmare. In my kids’ cases the big problem has been that Latin only has one section - so they have less flexibilty than the kids taking a more popular language. My older son also got ahead of the science curriculum and ended up taking it out of order and got in all three major science APs. We had to juggle schedule issues every year. Sr. year the compromise was dropping honors English.</p>
<p>Our school offers a ton of APs (21?) though I am not a counselor the answers to doubleplay’s questions.</p>
<p>Our school encourages kids they think will do well on APs to take them. This includes a section of AP World and AP Physics B for sophomores. Many have prerequites or exams or teacher recommendations required for entry.</p>
<p>Our school reports the number of AP Scholars on the school description sheet that goes out to colleges and they do mention the Newsweek list in their flyers that go out with the school budget vote. (Not that we rank very high.)</p>
<p>As far as I can tell there is no push for particular courses except for ones that already replace part of the NYS required curriculum. So some kids are pushed to do APUSH or AP World instead of the Regents levels of the courses. At least for APUSH 80%+ got 4s and 5s.</p>
<p>I would guess that number of APs figures into the “most rigorous” designation, but I don’t have the impression that kids go crazy over APs. Top kids probably take 1 or 2 as sophomores. 2 or 3 as juniors and 3 to 5 as seniors. No distinction that I can see is made between the one semester type and two semester type APs. (Not in the way they are weighted for GPA anyway.)</p>
<p>You can’t take someone who has a bachelors’ degree with no advanced study to teach a bachelor level class.</p>
<p>Unless they are teaching at University of Colorado- Colorado Springs- as my brother did as soon as he graduated with an engineering degree.
can is different than should.</p>
<p>My husband had to teach med school students histology his first year teaching without ever having taken histology before. He worked very hard to learn the material. Luckily it was team taught and his partner teaching labs was a veteran! (Dh’s does have a Phd in biophysics, but all his research involved e. coli cells and aemoebe, no human cells at all.)</p>
<p>Our school offers 20+ APs as well. Here’s the sort of “AP grubbing” that I see:</p>
<p>In order for a curriculum to be considered “most rigorous”, students have to take a <em>minimum</em> of 6 or so APs. What happens is that the kids figure out really quickly that some APs are difficult, time consuming, and have higher grading expectations; other not so much. Students naturally gravitate toward the “easier” APs (not necessarily easier in content, but like I said before- easier in terms of work load and grading standards). At our school, these APs are those that only cover a semester’s worth of college material (Gov, Enviro, Psych, etc.), and English Language (because there is no homework), and some other electives such as music (From what I’ve seen our AP music theory is not anywhere near as comprehensive as it should be, and the school does not report scores- I suspect the scores are abysmal). I’m sure APs differ by school- I’m only using our school as an example.</p>
<p>The bottom line is you have a bunch of kids taking classes they have no interest in, that do not relate to what they intend to study in college, because they need the A’s and they need the AP’s. </p>
<p>Secondly, I find the “most rigorous” designation criteria as mindless, bureaucratic, and arbitrary. You can have a kid who took 5 APs- Chem, Physics, Calc, English, and USH, and he will be given a “lower” rigor designation than one who took AP Stat, Lit, Psych, Enviro, Econ, and Gov, simply because of one less class. Secondly, the same kid who took those 5 APs would get a “most rigorous” designation at the public school up the street, which only offers 10 APs.</p>
<p>End result- a whole lot of course selecting on the basis not of what’s best for the overall long term educational goals, but what’s best for looking good on a piece of paper.</p>
<p>Dear Doubleplay,</p>
<p>Here are my responses to your questions. By the way, I’m not a counselor, but I am the AP Coordinator and work in the administration (I also teach 4 classes).</p>
<p>Does your school (or schools you are familiar with) encourage students to take as many APs as possible?</p>
<p>We encourage students to take as many APs as possible, but some have pre-reqs and others have mandatory drop recommendations if scores on early exams show that a student is not ready for this level of work or is not serious.</p>
<p>Do schools care about final scores? </p>
<p>Private schools do, because we use our pass rate to advertise.</p>
<p>Do schools stock their AP classes with only the best and brightest, even though other students are college bound as well?</p>
<p>The AP teachers wish it were this way, the academic counselor tries to get every kid to take at least 1 AP, and the high achievers as many as possible.</p>
<p>Do schools offer more classes in particular AP subjects or encourage more students to sign up for particular courses, because they have better AP test score success?</p>
<p>We’re a very small school, so we’ve only ever offered AP Calc A/B in multiple sections before. We might have to do the same with Chem one day.</p>
<p>Does your school label a student’s coursework as rigorous or not rigorous based on the number of AP classes? If so, is there a distinction between different APs (those that cover two college semesters vs. those that cover one)?</p>
<p>It depends on who is asking. If so, AP work is considered most rigorous (doesn’t matter which AP classes they take–just the number of them). Courses that are considered college-prep but non-AP (our UC approved A-G list), are considered middle-of-the-road. And our non-UC approved electives (Finance, Strength Training, Yearbook, etc.) are considered least-rigorous.</p>
<p>In other words, what has been the impact of APs on how students select their courses, how guidance counselors guide, and how schools decide what to and what not to offer and to whom?</p>
<p>That’s a big question that I don’t think my small school’s handling of the issue would be reflective of most high schools in America–so I will decline to answer it.</p>
<p>Hope it helps!</p>
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<p>A/B block scheduling, which means every course in the entire high school is 94 minutes long every other day.</p>
<p>It seems that the students in my school system are being shortchanged, compared to students in many other systems.</p>