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AP classes?


Iceskater101
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How Many A.P Classes have you taken?  

45 members have voted

  1. 1. How Many A.P Classes have you taken?

    • 0 b/c I'm a slacker (totally joking )
      10
    • 1 b/c they are challenging
      7
    • 3 b/c I can handle them
      10
    • 5+ b/c I'm an overachiever
      18


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This topic is for anyone who is in high school right now or has graduated but if you were in high school did you high school offer AP classes? If so on average how many did you take?

 

In my junior year I took an AP U.S History Class and I scored a 3

and for my senior year I'm taking A.P Literature and A.P American Government

so overall I will be taking 3 A.P Classes

 

how many A.P Classes have/did you take?

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None.

 

My mom was a teacher, and told me to skip it, since most of that is college specific and would require you to redo the work once you got there (highly dependent on the school, of course). The boosted GPA helps a bit, I guess, but all you really skip is intro classes if you get a great grade, and GPA alone doesn't get you the boost it used to when getting in to college; they are looking for extra curricular activities, clubs, volunteer work, etc these days.

 

I skipped those intro classes by taking a test before signing up for classes. :p

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My school only offers two AP classes and a few dual credit classes because it's very small and very remote. I took an AP Class last year (Psychology), and I'm taking another next/this year (Calculus). I'm also taking all of the dual-credit classes that are applicable to my college major (Computer Science).

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My high school had scattered AP courses that I never took interest in. Took all the University level courses, and haven't had any problems in university because of high school education, so I'm happy. From the people who I remember taking them, their success has varied, so I don't really know if it has a huge effect your future.

 

To answer the question, zero. Do I feel less educated, or do I regret not taking "AP" classes? No.

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I took three AP classes my senior year of high school and those were English, American History, and Calculus. I scored a three in History and a two in English and Calculus. The History credits counted for a two classes worth of credits where I went to college. I recycled a couple of essays from English for my English 102 class in college and didn't do half bad in my college Calculus classes either.

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It's been 14 years since I was in high school, but I definitely remember taking a few. I know I took AP calculus and did well. When I got to college I tested out of any general math requirements, but when I took physics and comp sci classes my first year in college, I still felt lost. It was like all my math knowledge was just gone. It was very frustrating. I thought for sure my work in high school would have left me better prepared.

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None.

 

My mom was a teacher, and told me to skip it, since most of that is college specific and would require you to redo the work once you got there (highly dependent on the school, of course). The boosted GPA helps a bit, I guess, but all you really skip is intro classes if you get a great grade, and GPA alone doesn't get you the boost it used to when getting in to college; they are looking for extra curricular activities, clubs, volunteer work, etc these days.

 

I skipped those intro classes by taking a test before signing up for classes. :p

 

It doesn't hurt to get a 3 on the AP exam and get a perfect on the placement exam though. That's how I skipped 3 semesters of Calculus.

 

Skipping Chemistry because I passed the AP exam was great too.

 

I never bothered with english or history. Freshman year I ended up needing to take Writing for College, an intro writing class so I could be deemed competent. Yes, english is my first and only language :(

 

It's been 14 years since I was in high school, but I definitely remember taking a few. I know I took AP calculus and did well. When I got to college I tested out of any general math requirements, but when I took physics and comp sci classes my first year in college, I still felt lost. It was like all my math knowledge was just gone. It was very frustrating. I thought for sure my work in high school would have left me better prepared.

 

After skipping calculus, I had to take 2 more math classes and they were pretty tough as well. Ordinary Differential Equations and Applied Linear Algebra (I think that is what it was called, it had to do with solving differential equations in a matrix).

Edited by Shinobi273
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None.

 

My mom was a teacher, and told me to skip it, since most of that is college specific and would require you to redo the work once you got there (highly dependent on the school, of course). The boosted GPA helps a bit, I guess, but all you really skip is intro classes if you get a great grade, and GPA alone doesn't get you the boost it used to when getting in to college; they are looking for extra curricular activities, clubs, volunteer work, etc these days.

 

I skipped those intro classes by taking a test before signing up for classes. :p

 

 

Most people have no idea how right you are about the GPA part. High schools that do inflated GPAs do a disservice to their students. THEY DO NOT INFLATE GPAs TO MAKE THE STUDENTS LOOK BETTER. THEY INFLATE GPAs TO RAISE THEIR AVERAGES AND MAKE THE SCHOOL LOOK BETTER. Most schools also don't tell their students that most, if not all, Universities recalculate inflated GPAs back down to normal and in the process often don't use the same formula that the high school used to boost the GPA. So in some cases when they recalculate a students GPA it ends up being lower then it would have been if it had never been inflated in the first place.

 

For example some schools might inflate an A grade in an AP class from a 4.0 to a 4.5. Some might inflate it to a 5.0. University X gets the transcript of a student from a school with inflated grades but doesn't know which formula their high school used. Most times they will just assume it was a +1 scale. So the University subtracts 1 even though the high school only added .5. All of a sudden the transcript that the University is judging the student on is showing the student as only getting a B in a certain class when in fact he got an A.

 

This situation is the reason why most high caliber private prep schools do not use inflated GPA systems. It is typically only poor quality private schools and public schools that use inflated GPA systems because they want an artificial means of making their students (and thus the school) look better on paper. Universities see through it. Trust me.

 

However, I do disagree with you and your mom about one thing. Yes, there are universities that do not accept some AP credit for certain, more specialized AP classes. However, as long as you get a 4 or a 5 on the AP test virtually all Universities (even top tier ones) accept credit for "base curriculum" classes. There are virtually no Universities that reject AP credit from classes like AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Physics, AP Calculus, AP English, AP US History, AP Euro, AP Econ (etc...). Skipping classes like these can take 1 to 2 years off the time it takes to get most degrees. From both a time and financial standpoint this is very beneficial.

Edited by bigbear.
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Most people have no idea how right you are about the GPA part. High schools that do inflated GPAs do a disservice to their students. THEY DO NOT INFLATE GPAs TO MAKE THE STUDENTS LOOK BETTER. THEY INFLATE GPAs TO RAISE THEIR AVERAGES AND MAKE THE SCHOOL LOOK BETTER. Most schools also don't tell their students that most, if not all, Universities recalculate inflated GPAs back down to normal and in the process often don't use the same formula that the high school used to boost the GPA. So in some cases when they recalculate a students GPA it ends up being lower then it would have been if it had never been inflated in the first place.

 

For example some schools might inflate an A grade in an AP class from a 4.0 to a 4.5. Some might inflate it to a 5.0. University X gets the transcript of a student from a school with inflated grades but doesn't know which formula their high school used. Most times they will just assume it was a +1 scale. So the University subtracts 1 even though the high school only added .5. All of a sudden the transcript that the University is judging the student on is showing the student as only getting a B in a certain class when in fact he got an A.

 

This situation is the reason why most high caliber private prep schools do not use inflated GPA systems. It is typically only poor quality private schools and public schools that use inflated GPA systems because they want an artificial means of making their students (and thus the school) look better on paper. Universities see through it. Trust me.

 

However, I do disagree with you and your mom about one thing. Yes, there are universities that do not accept some AP credit for certain, more specialized AP classes. However, as long as you get a 4 or a 5 on the AP test virtually all Universities (even top tier ones) accept credit for "base curriculum" classes. There are virtually no Universities that reject AP credit from classes like AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Physics, AP Calculus, AP English, AP US History, AP Euro, AP Econ (etc...). Skipping classes like these can take 1 to 2 years off the time it takes to get most degrees. From both a time and financial standpoint this is very beneficial.

 

When you fill out the CommonApp, you put both your GPA and the scale; therefore, the students aren't really getting screwed over as long as they know what they're doing when they're filling out the form. If you're worried that the college will screw up your GPA, you could always just put in your unweighted GPA. Also, you send in your high school transcripts to the schools, so they see what classes the student has taken and can then compare that to the weighted/unweighted GPA given so that they can figure out how the student did given the rigor of their schedule. I will give you the fact that using a weighted GPA can make some high schools look better than they actually are.

 

I do agree with you about the fact that AP's aren't useless. Like you said, nearly all schools will give you something if you pass the exam with a 4 or 5. I'm going into a top 25 university as a sophomore because of all of my AP credits.

Edited by Dukefan45
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I took AP Biology in my senior year of high school. I started out doing pretty well, but by the middle of the school year, I got lazy and slacked off. Ended up getting a 2 on the AP exam, mostly because I didn't bother studying really. I knew I wasn't going to get a 4 or 5 anyway.

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However, I do disagree with you and your mom about one thing. Yes, there are universities that do not accept some AP credit for certain, more specialized AP classes. However, as long as you get a 4 or a 5 on the AP test virtually all Universities (even top tier ones) accept credit for "base curriculum" classes. There are virtually no Universities that reject AP credit from classes like AP Bio, AP Chem, AP Physics, AP Calculus, AP English, AP US History, AP Euro, AP Econ (etc...). Skipping classes like these can take 1 to 2 years off the time it takes to get most degrees. From both a time and financial standpoint this is very beneficial.

 

Perhaps, but that wasn't the collective experience from my friends and myself, though that's only the UC system I'm familiar with, Davis and Berkeley in particular. Many of those classes (AP History, Lit) had to be retaken, mostly because Davis and Berkeley felt our school system (Glendale Unified) wasn't up to their standards. However, the AP classes are a lot more work than the actual classes. I don't know anything outside of the UC/California system, though.

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