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How Many AP Classes Should You Take?
What’s Covered:
- How to Decide How Many AP Classes You Should Take
- What If My School Doesn’t Offer APs
- How Do AP Classes Impact Your College Chances?
Most colleges, especially elite ones, consider course rigor to be a crucial component of their admissions process. Admissions officers want to see that you’re genuinely intellectually curious—and, on a more practical level, that you can excel while taking a rigorous course load.
At many high schools, AP courses are the most advanced ones offered, which means they’re the best way of demonstrating your course rigor. But how many APs do you actually need to take? Let’s take a look at the factors that will affect your AP schedule.
How to Decide How Many AP Classes You Should Take
There are a few key considerations you’ll want to take into account as you plan your schedule for next year.
1) Your dream schools
For the most part, the more selective the school you hope to attend, the more APs you should take—within reason. For Ivies and other top 30 schools, aim for 8-12 or more, if feasible. For the top 30-50 schools, 5-8 will usually suffice.
Of course, make sure you’re not overloading yourself. Poor grades, even earned in challenging classes, never helped anyone’s college applications.
2) Prerequisites
Most AP classes have certain prerequisites. For example, you won’t be able to enroll in AP Calculus (AB or BC) until you have a solid foundation in algebra, geometry, and precalculus. AP foreign language courses also require several years of study in your chosen language. The prerequisites you’ve fulfilled will affect which and how many AP courses you can pursue.
3) Your age
As a freshman, you’ll typically take one, if any, APs, in part because you probably won’t have completed any prerequisite courses yet. As you advance in your high school career, more AP options will open up to you.
During your freshman year, be sure to take honors classes, as they will prepare you to take and thrive in AP classes later in high school, and also eventually demonstrate to admissions officers that you always make an effort to challenge yourself, given the opportunities available to you.
If you’re aiming for a top school, use the following plan as a guideline, while remembering that all high schools are different and may have rules about what you can take each year:
Freshmen: 0-2
Sophomores: 1-3
Juniors: 3-5
Seniors: 4-6
4) Which courses are most relevant
If you’re deciding between different AP courses, consider which ones are more relevant to your prospective major. Let’s say you’d like to be on the pre-med track, which might mean a major in biology. You’ll want to take plenty of science and math APs, like Biology, Chemistry, Calculus, and Statistics. However, English and history-related APs aren’t as relevant to your major, so those aren’t as critical for your transcript.
On the other hand, if you are thinking about pursuing an English major in college, taking APs like English Literature & Composition and Art History would be relevant. Or, if you know you want to study abroad in a Spanish-speaking country, taking AP Spanish will put you in position to reach your goals in college.
5) Your schedule
Taking challenging courses is crucial for both your intellectual development and your college prospects, but you don’t want to sacrifice your mental health or neglect your extracurricular activities. Put simply, don’t overload on so many AP courses that you’re not able to do anything else.
While building your schedule, think about the difficulty of different APs, while bearing in mind that a particular course’s difficulty can vary by school and teacher. Try to establish a good balance of AP and honors or regular courses, by prioritizing APs that complement your interests, strengths, and career aspirations.
What If My School Doesn’t Offer APs?
Your application will be evaluated in the context of the opportunities available to you at your school. If your high school doesn’t offer AP courses, or only offers a few, you won’t be penalized for that.
If, for instance, your school offers three AP courses and you take two of them, your course rigor will likely be more impressive than that of a candidate who took five APs, but went to a school where 18 AP classes were offered.
Ultimately, you should aim to take the most challenging curriculum you can considering the opportunities available to you, within reason (which means, again, to make sure you’re able to live a balanced life). Colleges will receive a school report explaining the broader academic context of your school, and if you want to provide additional information that you feel is necessary to understand your transcript, the Common App has a section for just that purpose.
How Do AP Classes Impact Your College Chances?
While having AP classes on your transcript can be a crucial part of your application, especially at highly selective institutions, there are a lot of other factors that admissions officers consider as well.
If you’re wondering how you will stack up overall at the colleges you’re considering, check out CollegeVine’s free chancing engine, which evaluates a variety of factors like grades, course rigor, extracurriculars, and standardized test scores to estimate your odds of being accepted at over 1,600 schools across the country.
Our admissions calculator can also give you suggestions for how to boost your chances of acceptance—for example, by taking more AP classes in your junior or senior year.
