The Ugly Truth About Advanced Placement (AP) Classes
With the recent conclusion of AP exams, it’s crucial to address a significant aspect of your academic journey. How exactly do college admissions offices evaluate your AP exam scores? And what impact do those hard-earned college credits have on your future? This guide is intended to dispel a few of the most common (and most dangerous) misconceptions about APs, and in doing so, might come across as a bit negative. To be clear, there are many benefits and positives to AP courses, (read The Beauty of AP Courses), but the growing trend in college admissions is that students are taking too many APs, not too few.
While You’re Applying
This is where the first and biggest misunderstanding about AP exams happens. Most students believe that AP exams have an impact on their college application chances. After all, they struggled through a full year of challenging college-level academic material and crammed all that learning into a single massive half-day exam. It would only be right for such an academic feat to offer a proportionate reward. Sadly, this is actually not the case, and here is how you can tell: look at the sequence of steps involved in submitting your AP exam scores, and it will quickly become clear that they are not used for admissions purposes.
During the application process, you tell your colleges about the results of your AP exams by self-reporting them. This means you can decide which scores to include and which to leave out. Don’t worry, your colleges will ask you later to send in an official score report from the College Board so they can verify your actual exam scores. But herein lies the clue. Colleges do not require your official AP exam score report until AFTER you have been accepted. This is because of the true purpose of AP exams: to help colleges decide where to place you on the course progression and to decide how many credits to give you for the courses you’ve placed out of. Fun fact: this is why it’s called “AP” aka “Advanced Placement.”
But what about the other parts of your application that are self-reported? It’s true that your GPA and standardized test scores are also all self-reported. However, you are also required to immediately submit verifications for both your official high school transcript to verify your GPA and your official score report for your standardized test. In fact, your application is not considered complete until the college has received these.
After You Get In
The second misunderstanding of APs is a bit more insidious in that they can actually cause real negative consequences. The other big appeal of taking AP exams is the possibility of earning college credit and placing into advanced courses. These usually happen in tandem (ie. you place out of Chemistry 101 and are awarded the four credits that you would have earned if you had taken the course normally).
First, you should understand how college credits work. First, college credits fulfill prerequisites and open the path for more advanced classes. For example, completing and earning credit for Chemistry 101 is required for you to take Chemistry 201. Second, college credits contribute towards your graduation requirements. Most universities have a cumulative credit threshold before you can apply to graduate, along with certain course or subject requirements in addition to what’s required by your major(s) and minor(s).
Let’s first talk about placing into more advanced courses. It might sound pretty appealing to skip over those pesky intro-level classes so you can immediately jump to the big leagues. Herein lies the next major pitfall. Students who use their AP credit to skip ahead to a more advanced course might not be actually ready for such academic rigor, especially for new first-year students. This is because high-level courses build upon the knowledge and skills from lower-level courses, so unless you’re one of the lucky few to have a legendary high school teacher, the intro-level college course is almost always going to be better and higher quality than your high school AP-level course. By using your AP credit to skip a college course, you’re sacrificing your opportunity to build a stronger foundation in the subject and risking being behind your classmates from day one. Besides the gap in the course material, you should also consider your academic skills like note-taking, studying, reading, and test-taking. Intro-level college courses assume that you have high-school-level academic skills, while a higher-level advanced course will usually assume that you already have at least a year of college under your belt and the corresponding academic skills to show for it.
When it comes to your credit threshold for graduation and how AP credits work, you must first understand how credits contribute towards your graduation requirement. First, there is a total credit requirement or threshold before you can apply for graduation. Then within this total pool, there are usually two categories: major/minor requirements and college-specific requirements. These two parts together usually account for around two-thirds to three-fourths of your credit total. The remaining credits are often called “general credits” because there are no requirements attached to them, and they can come from any course. Although AP credits fulfill prerequisites and place you into more advanced courses, they are often counted as general credits when it comes to your graduation requirements. This is usually okay, but you should also be mindful that most universities adjust your tuition based on your total credits, which means that these additional general credits can quickly increase your tuition if you are not careful.
Recommendations
Before getting into recommendations, we understand that this topic can be quite sensitive, so please balance this advice with what you truly want. There are many benefits to APs that this guide does not cover and also many strategic profile considerations that are also beyond the scope of this article.
When it comes to taking AP classes, we recommend that you take them based on your profile. This means you should be focused and avoid the allure of taking every AP available.
When it comes to taking AP exams, we recommend that you sit the exam for every AP class you’ve taken unless there are financial constraints preventing you from doing so.
When it comes to claiming your AP credit, we recommend that you DO NOT claim your AP credits in your major(s). This is because you generally want to be as strong as possible where it counts. Claiming credits outside of your major has few academic implications but will contribute more general credits towards your graduation total (and your tuition increase).