Please rate my junior year schedule

Muufeen
Thu, 25 Aug 2016 03:32:37 +0000

Having a competitive schedule for college is admittedly very important. However, there is a point where taking one extra AP won’t improve your chances. You are already challenging yourself with AP Calculus, AP Lang, AP Stats, and AP Physics; APUSH isn’t going to make or break a college application.

Plus, you do not want to burn out in the middle of junior year. APUSH is very rigorous (even more so than AP World History, in my experience), and so if you seriously hate these types of history classes that stress essay writing and note-taking out of a textbook, I wouldn’t recommend taking it.

You need a balance between challenging yourself and having good mental health. Overloading yourself is a recipe for failure, especially in your most important year academically. You want to receive stellar grades in ALL of your classes while having time for extracurriculars, and if APUSH would increase your workload tremendously and/or reduce your enthusiasm for academics, it may not be worth it.

There are always benefits for taking APUSH, but it’s up to you to decide if you can survive a year of APUSH or not. For example, you learn tremendously from APUSH, you have the opportunity for AP credit, you can improve your GPA (but assuming that your GPA is already amazing, the improvement will be minimal). If you don’t want to take APUSH, don’t take it; get your parents involved and drop a level. Never compromise your grades and your mental state for course rigor.

All in all, you are the only one who can decide if you’re willing to take APUSH, not your counselor. If you’re willing to endure the stress and hard work for a brownie point in college applications, go ahead. However, given that you didn’t want to take APUSH in the first time, I would advise you to drop a level unless you magically get an interest in American history all of a sudden. Is the stress worth the 0.03 or something increase in your GPA and a slight increase in course rigor? For some, it is; for others, it isn’t.

Also, dropping AP Statistics is probably not going to change your workload by that much, unless Stats is a very homework-heavy class at your school. Dropping APUSH, on the other hand, will definitely lower your workload (according to my friends who took APUSH and dropped down to my school’s regular US History).