How Many APs Does It Take to Get Into Harvard?*

Attention Students: This is what happens when your load is too heavy.

As high school sophomores and juniors wrap up this semester, many of them start taking an early peek towards their course load in the year to follow.  ”How many AP courses should I take,” inevitably and unfortunately becomes the guiding question to much of the decision-making.  I say unfortunately because of the focus on raising GPAs via the bonus points that are typically added.  (This is de rigueur in California.)  The idea of taking a course because it sounds interesting or challenging seems almost quaint now.  Some of the brighter students will even shy away from art and music classes for fear of lowering their GPA by getting an “A” in a regular course that’s “worth” only 4 points and thus pulling down their 4.0+ average.

Advanced Placement classes, once open to only a very small number of top high school students around the country, have grown enormously in the past decade. The number of students taking these courses rose by nearly 50 percent to 1.6 million from 2004 to 2009. Yet in a survey of A.P. teachersreleased this year, more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” Some 60 percent said that “parents push their children into A.P. classes when they really don’t belong there.”

So yeah, saying it’s a mucked up system is an understatement.  The NYT steps up with nice series of short pieces from five different folks from the world of education and one shill from the College Board (birth mother of the AP program).  Most of them will leave you with a clear sense of how the AP program has deviated greatly from its original intent to give exceptional students a challenge within high school.  But since I’m trying to keep my focus on college admissions, the one piece I’ll direct you to specifically is by a Berkley researcher, Saul Geiser, who discusses the role of AP within the admissions process.  Says Mr. Geiser:

In extensive studies at the University of California, we have found that while A.P. exam scores are strongly related to student success, the number of A.P. classes that students take in high school bears almost no relationship to college performance. The key is not simply taking A.P., but mastering the material.

Hah!  Exactly what I was thinking but far more articulate coming from a Berkley guy, of course.  But what got me really stoked was his closing suggestion:

The simplest solution to these problems is to eliminate bonus points for A.P. courses in college admissions except when students take the A.P. exams and achieve at least a passing score. This would vastly reduce the total number of bonus points awarded, help curb grade inflation in high schools, and restore a measure of rationality to the overheated world of “high stakes” college admissions.

Having been on the “other” side of admissions, there’s no doubt that the rigor of a student’s program matters.  It matters a lot as it should.  But should that be at the cost of students exploring non-AP interests b/c they won’t get an extra bonus point?  In my mind, no.  In the end, genuine intellectual curiosity wins out over even rote mastery of the material.

One of my more cringeworthy moments at Caltech was reading the application of a student who by the end of his senior year would have taken 17 AP tests.  Noteworthy is that of the 12 he had already taken, he had received 5’s on all but one.  (Art History, I believe.  The most interdisciplinary of all the APs offered.)  With little debate in committee, we didn’t admit him.  Why?  Because nowhere in his application did he show any sort of particular joy for learning.  Rather, even his teacher recs indicated he was far more interested in racking up high AP scores than engaging in meaningful classroom discussions or pursuing anything intellectual beyond the basics of completing his coursework.

He was a nice enough kid I’m sure (and did end up at a very elite university–thank you, Google), but for a school like Caltech that prides itself on students working together collaboratively and thinking creatively as well, he wasn’t a good fit.  All the APs in the College Board’s cupboard wouldn’t have gotten him in.  That year, we surely took dozens of kids with half the number of APs but oodles more in terms of ambition and purpose in terms of their education and life in general.

Any kids reading this, take classes b/c they INTEREST or CHALLENGE you.  Not because they’ll “look good” to admissions officers.  You might not get a “bonus” point but you will get an education you enjoy and that’s never a bad thing.

* Oh yeah, how many APs does it take to get into Harvard?  At least 23 or there’s no hope.