<p>SimpleLife, it wouldn’t surprise me to find schools that use AP counts as a means to allocate merit aid. That’s an easy short hand for a school to use that is just trying to fill seats with some academic talent. In such case there’d be no need to scrutinize the applications with any particularity. (Moreover, students with a high number of AP credits tend to graduate early, which would free up the merit aid for the next batch of students.)</p>
<p>In any event, my point is that a high AP count is not the magic key to gaining admission to an elite college. Life would be much simpler (though not necessarily better) if college admissions were simply a numbers game based on weighted GPA and SAT. Everyone could just cram their class schedules with APs and hope to get as many A’s as possible. But if admissions really worked like that, there would be no need to consult “experts”” (like Sally Rubenstone, the Ask the Dean author) who have made lucrative careers out of dispensing college admissions advice to anxious families. </p>
<p>That’s why it’s especially curious to me that “Dean” Robenstone is suggesting to students that APs are some sort of admissions panacea. In fact, she just repeated this advice in her most recent Ask the Dean post, one in which she advises a high school freshman that he should drop drama so he can take more AP classes and shoot for valedictorian. I really don’t understand why she keeps pushing AP classes so much. But the fact that she is paid by the College Board, which happens to administer the AP exams, is enough for me to take anything she says on this topic with a grain of salt. </p>
<p>In any event, I would never have considered dropping theater in order to join my HS classmates in shooting for a max GPA. And perhaps it was exactly that attitude that made my application uniquely attractive to the Stanford adcom.</p>