<p>Hey, guys, it’s me again. I just found out today that my district only allows students to take two college classes (total! not two at a time…) per year. So, like, our local university has a trimester schedule, so you can only take two terms of classes and have the rest of the year off.
I’m just wondering how caltech views individual study? Does it equal to a college course? Or is it more like an AP?</p>
<p>Taking two college courses and doing some independent study on the side will certainly help you. Independent study is viewed roughly on a par with AP’s, but there is a lot of variance depending on how serious you seem about it. People who submit a few solutions to very hard problems that they were able to solve thanks to their independent study in a subject certainly seem much more serious than people who just write that they independently studied X or Y (unless there is some teacher recommendation or something like that attesting to the seriousness of the study). The main thing is that you have to send some kind of signal that makes it believable that your independent study is not just resume padding, but if you are truly working hard, that won’t tend to be hard.</p>