Rising Jr. needs Admissions Advice

collegealum314
Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:33:00 +0000

The bottom line is that you have overloaded yourself, and consequently, it looks like in some core science and math classes, you haven’t mastered the material. (Edit: ON further inspection, it looks like you haven’t finished calc so you took the AP calc exam unprepared. Some schools offer Calc AB and they mean calc I, but I think the AP calc AB exam is an easy versoin of the entire year-long sequence rather than covering only the 1st part.) There was an MIT blogger (and admit) who overloaded herself on AP’s and got nearly all B’s, and obviously she got in. However, I don’t think this is a good strategy for a scientific career or in general for college admissions. In general, colleges do not care if you overload yourself or not. Certainly, two C’s will hurt you more than having more AP’s will help. AP exam scores are self-reported and you are allowed to pick and choose what you report, so the exam scores in themselves will not hurt you. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but the top colleges won’t care much about the AP scholar award or that you did it as a sophomore–it’s not like you are in the top 400 of applicants in their eyes since there are only 400 who did it as a sophomore. Basically, you have one 5 on the AP test and a bunch of 3’s and 4’s, anyway, so it’s debatable how impressive that is. Interscholastic academic competitions (scholastic bowl, math/science olympiad exams, science olympiad (team competition,) and other competitions) are all viewed as a bigger deal. The sad fact is that even if you had gotten all 5’s and had gotten the corresponding award, the elite colleges would not respond how you think they would. I mean, they wouldn’t use it to separate the top-level candidates.

So, here is some advice:
For a career in science, devote enough time to your core classes (bio, math, etx.) such that you can get a 5 on the AP. If not, you will just have to take it again in college.
Drop the number of classes you are taking to get straight A’s junior and 1st semester senior year, have time to really ace a two to three classes so you can get outstanding recommendations, and have time to really shine in 1-2 extracurriculars. A laundry list of activities won’t impress them either.