Junior Year Course Schedule - Single AP Bio or AP Chem and Regular Bio?

[beefeater]

@randommom1

What sciences has she already had?

She’s taken honors physics freshman year and honors chem this year. She’s done well in both.

@Aejmom

AP Chem in 11th and dual enrollment physics in 12th shows rigor in science.

This is my take as well. It’s showing honors/AP/DE every year in science, so should be ok.

@happy1

I would shy away from two lab sciences in a year unless one is a real science whiz kid.

This is a concern of ours as well, but she has shown a lot of interest and ability in science. We’re not too worried about the classes per se, but it would certainly be taxing along with her ECs, etc. But she’s confident she can handle it, so she might just have to experience it to know for sure.

@Ohno2

In your daughter’s situation in which she is not particularly excited about Bio, older kids have reported high difficulty, and her teacher has recommended regular Bio for her, I would definitely recommend that she stick with regular Bio. That’s a pretty typical route.

Yep, this is fair and I think we’ve come around to this assessment as well. If she were really excited for bio, this might be different, but this is her least favorite science subject at the moment. That said, she’s had remarkably little exposure to bio, so we’ll see what she thinks at the end of next year.

@ColdWombat

Is AP physics offered at her HS, or just dual enrollment? How is the dual enrollment course described? If AP physics is offered, which ones (there are 3 different AP physics courses)?

AP Physics is NOT offered at her school. She’s actually petitioned to have it added, but she goes to a relatively small school, so I’d suspect this is not likely to happen at all.

@ColdWombat

If they offer honors bio during her senior year, would it work out to take physics plus honors bio? She wouldn’t be bored by the pace of the bio course, but if she finds it a little too challenging, her grades will have less of an influence on college apps than junior year grades would.

Taking bio her senior year is actually a thought we had as well. However, it looks like her school requires bio in the junior year.

@ColdWombat

Does she know what she might like to study in college?

As of today, it’s astronomy/astrophysics/physics. She’s particularly interested in taking the DE physics course her senior year. She’s taking Calc AB her junior year, so she’ll be able to take a calc-based DE physics course, which she’s pretty excited about. But who knows what she’ll decide when she gets there. I presume it’ll all change anyway.

And thanks everyone for the comments here! I do think we’ll probably advise her to take regular bio and AP chem. At the very least it aligns to what she wants to do AND she’s excited about taking AP chem since she wasn’t sure she’d have the schedule space with DE physics her senior year.