<p>How do colleges look upon this?</p>
<p>Demonstrates that you are self-motivated and either very goal-oriented or you just love learning. Self-studying is a great option if your school does not offer a certain course but it can be a rather ineffective undertaking.</p>
<p>what do you mean, ‘ineffective undertaking’?</p>
<p>My son did a lot of it. One of the things we had the foresight to do with his Latin self-study is have him take the National Latin Exam every year. He medalled on it every year; that allowed him to be able to “show” schools he had done real work, instead of just saying, “I self-studied Latin”.</p>
<p>They can’t help but look at it positively, if you can demonstrate mastery by some objective measure, like the SAT Subject Test.
I’ve had two self-study kids go go through the process so far. They were home schoolers who never “took” a course or had a tutor. One graduated from an Ivy last year and the second will start at another Ivy this fall.</p>
<p>What if I’ve already taken the subject test in that subject and I’m taking the AP exam now?</p>
<p>It’s good, why not?</p>
<p>Shows initiative.</p>
<p>thanks! do you know some good self study materials other than regular ap review books?</p>
<p>Get some old textbooks at half-price books. I just got a calc book for 5$ in near mint.</p>
<p>You might get the textbooks and look up online stuff (tons of notes sites, etc.). But definitely get review books. I got both the textbook and a review book for psych, but ended up using only the review book.</p>