r/APStudents

Let me tell you a story: a long long time ago a coalition of elite universities created what is now known as college board and also created the ap program. It was originally meant for the top 1% of students at elite preparatory schools, but soon students from normal public schools realized that college intro content was not that hard and thus AP exploded in popularity. This meant that highschoolers would not have to relearn content they already knew in college and as a plus saved money.

This was a perfect system saving thousands of dollars and ensuring that high schoolers can actually get to classes they deserved to get put into. However, this system was too perfect for the universities. Who right after ap got extremely popular suspiciously began saying AP classes did not match their courses anymore and at first started raising the score to get credits from 3 to 4 and then from 4 to 5 but eventually just stopped accepting credit at all.

Let me tell you another thing about AP it gives credits for 100$ where universities would charge for thousands of dollars, so it is suspicious when more students than ever started saving money and not giving money to universities that universities like Dartmouth started pulling out biased studies to stop AP acceptance at all. They always used flawed reasoning to abolish ap acceptance when the real reason is always money and now AP is suffering more than ever in states without strong articulation agreements.

Universities are now devaluing APs in several ways:

• The most obvious path that most elite universities are doing is not accepting AP at all eg Dartmouth, Harvard, and Caltech they might use it for placement but they turned against their own creation for money so the students are forced to spend 4 years of tution (even though they already have large endowments).
• Another way is not accepting certain APs which I understand for new or niche courses like AP African American Studies or AP Art History but some colleges don't accept popular APs like psychology or chemistry
• The other way they devalue AP credits is requiring a 4 or 5 for any credit at all which means it is almost now impossible to get meaningful credit with a 3 nowadays even at state universities
• The 4th path is the way I hate the most reducing the quality of credit the ap will get you like giving only algebra based physics credits for ap physics cs or a general elective for ap english lit. This is how most public universities in articulation states get away with not accepting ap.

But why am I talking about this because recently my state's state university University of Utah has recently taken two horrible decisions regarding AP Stem. First they will no longer give second semester of general chemistry for AP Chemistry even if you get a 5, you will just get first semester even though AP Chem's curriculum contains second semester gen chem. Secondly and most horrible for engineers they will no longer give calc based physics credits for AP Physics Cs like they will give the same algebra based credit you get from 2, for E&M and 1 for Mech

If a low level state school becomes this stingy who will follow suit will my preferred University BYU start denying useful ap credits too. Will the only ap friendly colleges be local community colleges?

Guess what I am saying is WE NEED STRONGER ARTICULATION AGREEMENTS perhaps a national one that targets national funding. Your credit is not worth more because you professor does a special lecture

I'm an international 11th grader, and in my curriculum, we barely cover anything calculus except functions, basic derivatives and integrals in senior year. I'm interested in improving my math overall without risking my actual GPA, but I'm a bit worried it might be too rigorous and take away too much time from my actual studying, since I'll have to take it externally. Is it a, worth the struggle, and b, manageable in the circumstances of a weak math foundation and not too much time to give?