3
3 years ago
Admissions Advice

Does the time of taking a class effect how rigorous college admissions officers see it?
Answered

I'm taking APUSH as a freshman, is this seen as more impressive than taking it as a junior or senior, or does it really not matter to them.

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Accepted Answer
3 years ago

Not necessarily. If there are 20 students that apply to Stanford from your high school, then the AO in charge of reviewing the apps from your school will compare your course rigor, grades, test scores, intellectual vitality against the other 19 applicants from your school. And furthermore, if there are 100 that apply from your school district, then they get folded into the evaluation as well. So it's entirely possible that a rival school might have more admits than your school because they performed better with the same opportunities offered within the district.

If it's not that unique or special for a freshman to take an AP class, then it's doesn't carry much weight. Also, remember that some schools like Stanford, actually recalculate their own GPA by throwing out Freshman classes and grades and only count 10th and 11th grades and the mid year report from RD applicants for 12th grade, so keep that in mind. Someone who take 10-12 APs between 10th and 11th grade at your school and gets As in them and 4s and 5s as AP scores, will most likely be a better candidate at Stanford than someone who takes 6-8 APS and gets less than As and 3s on the AP exams.

Therefore, it's important to understand what's important to the college you are applying to and make adjustments now and don't make any assumptions that your decision is going to give you a boost over one of your peers at your school.

Make a list of the colleges you are interested in applying to and look on their websites and research their common data sets on the internet to understand the stats from the admits that get into those schools.

Good luck with your course work and college applications planning and strategy.

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