AP Courses: How many do colleges want?
I’ve just started researching college admissions in depth and already I'm about to answer a question with the same response that annoys me so much from college admissions directors. (Let me apologize now.)
A reader posed this question: How many Advanced Placement courses should a student take in high school to go to college?
A reader posed this question: How many Advanced Placement courses should a student take in high school to go to college?
The answer: “It depends.”
On what? On the student, the high school attended, the desired college.
Students can take no AP courses or one or two and find a fine college to attend. Others can take five or six AP courses in their senior year alone and get rejected from Harvard.
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Why students fail AP tests
My column last week about how to reveal the secrets of which teacher is getting the best Advanced Placement results received many more comments than I expected. This was, I thought, a topic only for insiders, AP obsessives like me. I forgot, once again, that college-level exams have become a rite of passage for at least a third of American high schoolers, with that proportion increasing every year.
The column provided links to the several local school districts that have posted the subject-by-subject AP results for each school. I was shocked that any were doing it, since five years ago when I asked about this, few school officials had given it much thought. Since the AP tests are written and graded by outside experts, a teacher who does not challenge his students in class is likely to have lots of low scores on that school report, which until now hardly anyone had a chance to see.
Many thought I glossed over the effects of opening up AP courses to anyone who wants to get a useful taste of college trauma, sort of like camping in the back yard before your dad takes you to the Sierras.Enough mediocre students have enrolled in AP, and a similar program International Baccalaureate, to lower average scores even in the classes of the best teachers.
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