Online Classes (such as FLVS) vs. Actual Classes for APs

squ1rrel
Sun, 28 Apr 2019 13:01:05 +0000

I’ve been causing somewhat of a ruckus in my school the past year or so. My school is a large New Hampshire public school, with about 450 or so students in my class. But due to an overwhelmingly white population, I’m the only Asian in the entire grade (or, who actually cares about his future anyway). Looking through the past top ten, I haven’t seen any other Asians.

I exhausted the school math curriculum this year (we only offer up to Calculus AB), and I’ve just realized how easy life would be if I took more classes on our online coursework provider, VLACS:

https://vlacs.org/competency_level/advanced-honors/

Which uses the same exact content that FLVS had (I don’t understand what it is, it’s free, but teachers who are just as qualified…maybe everyone should start using this???)

Anyways, our school accepts full credit for them and puts these grades into our GPA. We also get the HIGH SCHOOL credit. I’ve heard that some of these classes are an easy A according to this thread, yet still informative:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/1182954-official-flvs-ap-thread.html

In school, some teachers are notorious for giving busywork and annoying assignments. If I can do the online courses and get away with the same GPA and better grade, but have more time to do other things, why wouldn’t I do this? Do colleges care whether or not it was taken at school or online? To be clear, on my transcript, all that will show up next to the course name is (VLACS).

Studying for the APs won’t be an issue; I’ve always been good at standardized testing, and if I feel like the content review wasn’t thorough enough, I would just get a review book.

I’ve already signed up to take Calc BC and Computer Science A for next year, mostly because I have to. Junior year I need to commute an hour a day to the University of New Hampshire for Linear Algebra; thus if I take lots of APs online, I would benefit a lot as I lose 2/7 of my school day from Linear Algebra.

Thank you!