<p>It should be the rare case where a student would have to drop music in order to maintain a course load that is sufficiently rigorous for admission to a top university.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, the exact count of AP’s taken is not really that big of a deal. Understand that AP classes are generally equivalent to entry level courses at an average college. It serves no purpose to prove over and over (and over) again that you can handle moderately difficult coursework of this type. </p>
<p>Very few students are admitted to top schools based on an academic hook in the first place and virtually none that I’m aware of are admitted based solely on the high volume of AP classes they’ve taken. Keep in mind, there were more than 1.8 million AP tests taken last year. Doing something that is done by others more than 1.8 million times each year seems a poor means to distinguish yourself in the application pool for an elite college.</p>
<p>As others have suggested, it is certainly important that you take a rigorous academic core of classes and that you do well in those classes. But I can see no benefit for a committed musician to drop music solely to add yet another AP class to their schedule.</p>
<p>Interestingly, I attended the All-Southern California High School Honors Symphony Orchestra concert this past weekend and the conductor, a Northwestern University professor, interrupted the concert to deliver a speech on this exact topic. He said that the students up on that stage were on the “right track” if they wanted to attend Northwestern or other top colleges. Back when he was a high school conductor he had never understood why some of his students would abandon their commitment to music simply to add APs. And now that he is a college professor he realizes even more what a mistake it was for his students to abandon music under the mistaken belief that it would improve their college admissions odds.</p>
<p>My own experience bears this out to some degree as well. I was a full-on theater geek in HS and, as a result, ended up with far fewer AP classes (and a lower weighted GPA) than a good number of my classmates. Yet I was the only student from my graduating class admitted to Stanford. I believe that maintaining my commitment to theater served me far better than maxing out my weighted GPA would have.</p>