<p>The vast majority of med schools would be more impressed by a student (lets call him Student A) with a stack of 5 ap scores of 5 for all the introductory science and math classes and then a row of A’s in the next most advanced classes, say physical chemistry, differential equations, biological chemitsry, and quantum physics. Any medical school would choose this student over Student B , ( a straw man who scored 5’s on all the AP exams but had to repeat introductory biology, chemistry and physics and calculus I). Even though Student B got all A’s in the introductory courses, it is clear that Student A is more learned and accomplished individual. And Student B and soicety in general are clearly being cheate4d. </p>
<p>Apparently, you feel that the Medical School is better off with the student repeating the introductory sequence even though the student has the honors grades to prove that it is not necessary, and could do the advanced work. Amazingly, the college he attends probably had this same opinion every year through about 2003 also-before the bursar’s office got control of things.</p>
<p>“Remember why LACs refuse to accept AP credit in the first place”</p>
<p>Once again, I have no idea whatsoever what you people are talking about .</p>
<p>My daughter got 30 AP credits at the LAC she attends, and fully expected to get same at three others she was considering.</p>
<p>In contrast, we were at an info session at Columbia for D#2 where they said they would give no more than one semester’s worth of AP credits for any entering freshman. </p>
<p>our personal experience does not indicate that there is in fact any global difference in AP credit policies between LACs and the liberal arts colleges of universities. I don’t think you people should keep following up on this premise unless you have some backup to show there’s systematically any real differences. I don’t think there is.</p>
<p>vienna man, pre-med students face tough decisions in the situation that you mention.</p>
<p>Med schools might indeed by more impressed by the student who took the more advanced courses. However, the content of those specialized, advanced courses is not covered on the MCAT; the content of the introductory courses is. A more rigorous college introductory course may provide better preparation for the MCAT than an AP course would.</p>
<p>Some schools that only go by GPA for grad school admittance, and not by the school curriculum will be a challenge for those from LACS without grade inflation.</p>
<p>However, one research neurologist who heads his own group, that we know at the university of Washington, said that compared to Reed ( where the average GPA is 2.8), medical school was a piece of cake, so while he may not have gotten into every medical school that he applied to, once he got there, he was able to finish- and to me- that is what counts :)</p>
<p>monydad, policies differ, but there does seem to be a trend for some top liberal arts colleges to accept less AP credit now than formerly. I looked at the Web sites of the top 4 LACs on the US News list and found the following:</p>
<p>Williams: Uses AP to place students into more advanced courses only. AP cannot be used to decrease the number of courses required for graduation. This seems to be a relatively new policy, though.</p>
<p>Amherst: Same as Williams, but I could not find out whether it is a new policy.</p>
<p>Swarthmore: Accepts AP credit and allows students to use it to decrease the number of courses/semesters required for graduation.</p>
<p>Wellesley: Accepts AP credit, but only allows a student to apply about a semester’s worth of such credits toward graduation (it used to be two semesters’ worth).</p>
<p>What you’ve just listed is a few individual schools with disparate approaches towards APs. </p>
<p>We encountered a great deal of variation in how APs were treated. This variation applied to colleges large and small.</p>
<p>I’ve already described Columbia’s policy which appears to be the same as one you described for Wellesley.What you listed for Swarthmore is what my daughter found at the majority of LACs she personally applied to. There may well be a few elite large universities that have AP policies similar Amherst and williams. Even if not, what Amherst and Williams does appears to me to be what Amherst and Williams does. I did not observe any trend, or homogeneous approach. I still see no basis to make blanket statements that, as a group, LACs are different than comparable quality universities in this area. I see individual differences among schools, individually,not necessarily between groups LAC vs. university.</p>
<p>I don’t see any particular pattern of differences between LACs and universities, either, but I can see why the OP might be more concerned about restrictions on AP credit at LACs. At a university, a student who has a lot of AP credit but is prevented from graduating early could at least theoretically take graduate courses during his/her senior year, but at an LAC, which doesn’t have graduate courses, this option is not available.</p>
<p>I would concur with your assumption on Student A. But, you contradict your earlier point, i.e., graduating early. One cannot graduate early if all the AP Chem, Physics and Bio credits only mean that a student has to take the next level class. (Not saying that its a bad thing, but they can’t graduate in three years – thus, for med applicants, the AP course becomes an exemption from a prereq, but does not provide course credit towards graduation.</p>
<p>Vienna Man, you should refrain from calling other people ‘silly’, because I actually think it is you that is being silly. You keep constantly insinuating that there is some sort of ‘conspiracy’ of the school to extract more tuition by disallowing AP credits. First of all, I have a very hard time believing this to be true, especially for the rich LAC’s. The top LAC’s have over a billion dollars of endowment. Do you think they really care about getting a few more tuition-years from a few more students? That’s just a rounding error to them.</p>
<p>But even if it were true, there are so many easier ways for a school to obtain more tuition. Let me enumerate just a few of them:</p>
<p>1) Hold more open-enrollment and expensive summer/extension classes.
2) Repeal need-blind admissions - only admit those students who are rich enough to pay full fare. Concurrent with that, you can cancel all of your financial aid. After all, if you are admitting only rich people, then you won’t need to offer any financial aid.
3) If you continue to provide financial aid, then push those students who are getting the most aid to graduate as quickly as possible so that the school no longer has to support them.
4) Provide more dual-degree/dual-major programs, study-abroad programs, or other such initiatives to cause students to want to stay in school for extra years, thereby paying more tuition. Perhaps you can effectively bar these programs from any students who are getting financial aid by stating that aid will be provided for only a maximum of 4 years, and any extra years are on the students’ own dime (which would mean that those students effectively would not be able to participate in any of these programs).
5)Never expel anybody, even if they are performing poorly. After all, an expelled student is no longer paying tuition. So no matter how poorly a student is performing, never expel them. You can place them on academic probation, you can sanction them, you can give them terrible grades, but never actually do anything to cause them to become unregistered. An unregistered student is an unpaying student. One ‘innovation’ to this tactic is to conduct expulsions on a case-by-case basis, which in reality woul mean only expelling a bad student if he is on financial aid, because doing so would actually save money for the school. </p>
<p>The point is, if all a school wanted to do was obtain more tuition, there are so many easier ways to do. So why would they try to do it by fiddling with AP credits? That’s an extraordinarily roundabout way of doing things.</p>
<p>And like I said before, if you don’t like that a school won’t offer you proper AP credits, fine, don’t go there. Nobody has a gun to your head. There are plenty of schools out there. Find the one that fits you best.</p>
<p>Again, I think this is a serious mischaracterization that I previously addressed. First off, some LAC’s indeed actually offer graduate courses. Bryn Mawr’s claim to fame is that it was the first women’s college to offer graduate degrees, including PhD’s. {In fact, really, I think that Bryn Mawr should not be considered to be a LAC at all, but I digress.} Secondly, many of the top LAC’s offer cross-reg policies with a nearby graduate school to alleviate just this problem . For example, Wellesley has a full cross-reg relationship with MIT. Amherst, Smith, Mt Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges all have a relationship with UMass-Amherst. Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford with UPenn. The Claremonts with Claremont Graduate School (and Scripps with Caltech). In fact, I would argue that students at some of the LAC’s actually have MORE access to graduate-level courses than the students at some of the major universities. For example, I would argue that a Swarthmore student has, through the UPenn cross-reg relationship, better access to graduate courses than students at many universities do. Keep in mind that there a lot of universities out there that greatly restrict the opportunity of their undergrads to take grad-level courses. </p>
<p>Furthermore, even if you do go to a university that offers you graduate-level courses, that’s not to say that those courses are that good. There are a lot of mediocre graduate programs out there. I would surmise that the undergraduate courses at the top LAC’s would teach you more than a graduate course at, say, UMass-Boston. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree with this point also. On the one hand, vm, you talk about this conspiracy of schools to not take AP credits to allow people to graduate early. But then you talk about premeds using AP credits to vault them into higher-level courses with which they can impress med-schools. Well, if they are doing that, then they aren’t graduating early. </p>
<p>Hence, it seems to me that if you want to find somebody to blame, you should blame the med-schools for not taking AP credits. Don’t blame the LAC’s. They had nothing to do with the med-schools deciding not to accept AP credits. </p>
<p>I would also submit this quote from the Stanford Quest Scholars premed advisory page:</p>
<p>*
“Myth #2.
IF I DON’T TAKE THE ABSOLUTELY
HARDEST TRACK AT STANFORD, MEDICAL
SCHOOLS WILL LOOK DOWN ON ME.
False. Taking the hardest track in every subject
certainly helped you get into Stanford, but this
doesn’t translate into medical school admissions. Taking
the 20 series in math and physics is just fine. Medical
schools don’t have the time or energy to diligently
follow all of the courses offered at every college in the
nation. As long as you do well in a moderately challenging
course load, you will do fine. The key is to
find your passion academically and pursue it—while
still taking enough of the pre-med courses to score reasonably
well on the MCAT.
Take home point: You are You are no longer in high
school, and the rules are different.” *</p>
<p>If I were running a bursar’s office, I would hire you tomorrow. What good ideas.</p>
<p>One serious point- These endowments don’t help students nearly as much as they should because of the college rankings system. The logic is this-my school will rise in the rankings if I keep more money reinvested since the value of my endowment makes others perceive my school as better. I look a lot better saying that my endowment is up more than that of a competitor rather than saying that it dropped because I used more of it to cut my school’s rate of tuition increase in a given year. There is, thus, a tremendous disincentive to reduce tuition increases, because of this. Its lot like the way in which the Forbes 400 ranking hurts philanthropy since, anyone who gives part of his fortune away risks falling lower or even off the list. </p>
<p>If these large endowment schools were truly committed to students rather than impressing people who read endowment tables and use them in college rankings, tuition wouldn’t have risen three times the inflation rate over the past 25 years.</p>
<p>And yet I’m not even a professional bursar. I just thought about those ideas in the space of ten minutes. If I can come up with ideas like that that quickly, I’m sure that people who actually do that kind of work for a living could come up with hundreds more. But the fact that they haven’t actually implemented any of my ideas indicates that they aren’t really try to squeeze tuition. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In response to this, I would repeat my basic point which is that you don’t have to go these schools. You have a choice. Nobody has a gun to your head. If you find that you can’t afford a particular school, then don’t go there. Plenty of highly successful people never went to a top school. Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) went to Washington State University (and eventually dropped out). Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, went to the University of Maryland for undergrad. </p>
<p>Or, at least, you don’t have to go there for undergrad. You can get your doctorate from these high-endowment schools, where they will completely fund you all thr way through. For example, I know some quite rich people who are getting their PhD’s at Harvard and are on full stipend even though they are independently wealthy. For example, I know one guy who enjoyed a very successful career as a Wall Street financier and venture capital, and has now decided to get his doctorate at Harvard Business School in order to become a professor of finance. He’s a self-made independently wealthy man, and could easily retire off his savings. Yet Harvard has granted him a full doctoral stipend anyway, even though he quite clearly doesn’t need it. </p>
<p>So what should you do for undergrad? Get a merit scholarship to give you a full ride. My brother did that - he got a full ride out of Caltech. I know people who have gotten full rides out of places like Duke, Northwestern, Emory, Washington University, etc. One of my friends got a full ride at Stanford (via a football scholarship). You can even get full rides at places that don’t give merit rides via outside scholarships - I know people who have gotten full merit rides at Harvard and MIT this way. </p>
<p>So you keep complaining about how schools are supposedly squeezing tuition out of people. My response to that is, my brother got a full merit ride to an elite school, so why can’t you? I don’t want to have to be the one to point this out, but if you’re not good enough to get a full ride, then don’t go around trying to find scapegoats. You should have worked harder. My brother worked hard, and that’s why he got the full ride.</p>
<p>a guy who has passed five or six Ap exams with a grade of 4 or 5 has worked pretty hard in my opinion and should not be cheated. Why do you want to cheat the guy who has worked that hard.</p>
<p>By the way I am not finding any scapegoats. I used AP for almost a full year of academic credit at a top university. At the time it was nice to save all that cash and proceed right to grad school. and it amazes me that today that would be worth $50,000 after tax or $80,000 pre tax dollars, with the way tuitions have exploded.</p>
<p>The Advanced Placement exams are developed, issued, and graded through College Board, not through a group of college faculty. I think the real complaint should be with CB which charges an exorbitant fee per test. CB is making more $ off the total costs of the tests per year than any one college would lose per year if they issued credit for AP and thus “sacrificed” the tuition.</p>
<p>The break even point is about $16,000 per exam in lost fees/tuition with a pretaxcost of $80,000 divided into 5 AP exams. The $100 fee per exam is nominal and is paid for in many school districts. But I would agree it should be cut too.</p>
<p>Vienna Man: I got 5s on 9 AP tests in high school. With those scores, I would be eligible to graduate a year earlier from Yale, where I will be starting in the fall. Yet, I am certain that I will not choose to do so. There are so many academic opportunities that I will never have a chance to explore, even if I spend 4 years there, never mind if I graduate in 3. For many people, a top college is not just a path to making money: it is an opportunity to broaden one’s horizons and to explore interests that may or may not be directly related to a future career. Personally, I want to avoid the real world as long as possible, so spending the full four years at college is much preferable, in my opinion, to starting grad school or work one year earlier. I think that if you look at top colleges (which for the most part are the ones that limit AP credit) you will find that most students have a similar attitude. The few who prefer to graduate a year early can choose to attend a school that will allow them to do so without sacrificing in quality of the institution. This probably occurs at no loss to schools like Amherst that do not offer AP credit (except as placement) as they already receive many more qualified applicants than they have spaces available, and, presumably, students who are interested in graduating early do not apply to them anyway.</p>
I don’t believe that there any colleges that do not let students place into more advanced courses using APs. The difference is in whether APs can be used to graduate early. Thus, Student B is not a possible case (at least not at colleges I am aware of) and therefore is irrelevant to the discussion.</p>