Relative importance of AP's

bookwormmichelle
Thu, 06 May 2010 17:47:18 +0000

I have 16 and 14 year old sons that have always been homeschooled, mostly by non-traditional, Charlotte Mason-style and self-study means. They are both very bright and have done a lot of extra work (one has studied Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, Indonesian, college-level economics, and has designed his own linguistics study course, the other has studied Swahili, Spanish, Latin) They both test on the ITBS/ITEDS extremely well, we expect they will do well on ACT/SAT as well. They participate and do very well in the National Latin Exam. Neither, however, has any “outside” grades, AP courses, community college courses. Our local high school is extremely homeschool-unfriendly, refuses to even let our son take the PSAT there–we are going to have to drive him a ways to take it in October. (We live in the rural Midwest) They don’t want to let us take any AP tests there either. My son wants to self-study and then take the tests, but we just can’t figure out how to do it. We have asked questions at the College Board site and not gotten a response. We especially don’t know if any schools around here will ever be offering, for example, AP Vergil or something like that. We can’t really afford any expensive online AP courses (we have other kids to buy stuff for too) plus then we still would have the problem of where to take the exam. How important are AP tests? Can we show some level of “outside validation” through the NLE, CLEP tests (which we can take at a local community college) or SAT II’s? Do they not have quite the same panache as the AP scores? I guess I’m asking, is it worth the hassle and headache to try to locate a school and potentially drive long distances to get the AP score?