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AP: Advanced Placement or “As Possible”?

We frequently get asked by our students and/or their parents: How many AP classes should I take to be competitive for US colleges?

The question betrays a misunderstanding of what US colleges are looking for. Only when you have a deeper appreciation for how schools actually look at applicants’ transcripts and test scores can you begin to understand the answer to "how many AP classes should I take?"

Here’s the deal:

The best US schools get many thousands of applications for their freshmen class from all over the world. The admissions office wants to select the best students from among these applicants.

Presumably, a key measure for determining who these “best” students are is how well they performed academically in high school. As a result, all US colleges ask students to submit their transcripts, GPAs and any academic honors they received in high school (like valedictorian).

But here’s the problem:

Each high school is different.

This is true of every US high school, where the curriculum is not standardized across the nation.

It is even more true for the large body of international applicants from all over the world.

Each school offers different courses, has a different student body, and has different teachers.

If each high school is different, how are admissions officers supposed to differentiate between two top students from two different high schools? Are they equally qualified? Is one more qualified than the other?

To be clear, it is not just a question of “smarter”. The top student at a very fancy school might be seen as a less attractive student than a top student from a very poor school, even if the first student took many AP classes and the latter student didn’t.

Why?

While colleges could choose to simply rely on relationships with particular high schools, as as they once did for schools like Andover and Exeter, this is in fact no longer the case.

Instead, college admissions offices have come up with a complicated, time consuming, and ultimately subjective process by which they seek to do their best to determine how students from one school compare to students from other schools, seeking to account for discrepancies between schools in terms of their size, resources and curricula. Part of this process involves asking the high schools themselves to prepare profiles explaining their curriculum, philosophy and extracurriculars.

One part of this subjective but integral analysis is how students perform on standardized tests. Standardized tests are so important precisely because they are standardized, and thus allow for easy comparison.

Now:

Take 2 students from 2 schools – Ace and Bo. Ace got an A in his advanced math class, Bo got a B. However, Ace got a 700 on his SAT II Math test, while Bo got an 800.

So, who knows math better?

Given the wide discrepancies between curricula, it would be very easy to explain away Bo’s B grade as a the result of a bad teacher, a harder class or numerous other reasons. You couldn’t really explain away his 800, however.

So, what's the answer to "How Many AP Classes Should I Take?" What does all of this mean in practice?

1. What is available.

Colleges look to see if you took a very rigorous curriculum relative to what is available at your high school. If your high school only offers one AP class, then it is fine to just take one. If you high school offers 10, it won’t look particularly good if you only took one, as there will probably be many students who take all or most of the ones offered.

2. Curriculum trumps GPA.

Taking a less rigorous curriculum to keep your GPA up will usually backfire. You don’t have to take every advanced class, but you have to take what would be considered one of the most demanding course loads your high school offers if you want to be competitive for top US schools. While having a strong GPA is undoubtedly important, your performing well on the parallel standardized test can help compensate for imperfections in your GPA.

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3. IB is great.

If you have the option of taking IB courses, those are great! Even though the IB is not as popular in the US as APs, all colleges are familiar with it and it is considered very rigorous. One advantage IB students have: You can only take IB exams if you take IB courses. But you can take AP exams even if you did not take an AP course. So, in theory, you could study for both simultaneously and really impress the admissions office by performing well on multiple tests.

4. Take as many standardized tests as possible.

Especially SAT IIs and APs. We stress “as possible” – there is no point taking these tests to do poorly. But if you do well, they will help make you shine academically.

5. AP classes cannot replace passion.

APs are a great way to demonstrate academic talent, if those are the best options available to you. However, they are pretty useless when it comes to demonstrating leadership, passion, initiative, personality – all the other things outside of academics which are so important to the admissions offices. But other learning opportunities can demonstrate those traits, such as:

1. • Publishing a paper on an academic subject in a peer-reviewed journal
   • Taking a college-level course in a subject for which there is no AP (like, for example, Yiddish)
   • Performing research or fieldwork for a professor
   • Taking a summer class at a US university

If any of these align with your application persona, or the central theme of your application, they show not only that you can excel in a subject, but that you are enthusiastic about the subject and willing to find ways to excel at it beyond the bounds of your high school’s curricular offerings.

For the admissions offices, at least, that is the highest form of advanced placement.