Based on my own experiences and seeing my cousins who just graduated HS this year, students taking AP classes tend to hang out with each other.[/quote]
As an AP teacher I can assure you this is correct for most students, not just your cousins. Oftentimes AP kids will play the same sports together and tend to date other AP kids.
When my own kids are old enough for high school I’ll want them to be in AP classes just so they’ll hopefully have a better peer group.[/quote]
Here’s a little tip for those of you with school aged kids, encourage them to take AP classes, not just for the friends but for the college credit. Mine is now at a University and I was pleasantly suprised to see that online he has almost a year of school knocked out just because of the AP classes. I don’t believe that he will finish a year early, but it should make it easier to finish in 4 years. When your kid takes an AP class there is a private comapany that charges $70 per class to take a test (which I thought was a racket) and when they get into college that same company charges for you to send the test results to the university (another racket). But now that it’s in the rear view mirror, that was money well spent. I’m burping up about 20k per year, per kid for college, so that $70 test seems like a bargain if it will save me 10k or 20k by not having them go an extra semester or two. At these prices, I’d rather they don’t spend 5 1/2 years on their undergraduate degree like I did. If you get them to take the AP classes and pay for the tests, the odds will increase that they wont.
Another helpful tactic is that the AP classes give you credit for many of the 101 classes. Many universities give incoming freshman first dibs at classes, then graduating seniors, then seniors, then juniors, and sophmores go last. If your AP kid uses their freshman year class selection trump card to take sophmore level courses, when they are toiling around trying to crash classes as a sophmore they won’t be taking the same classes as other sophmores. I remember having to pick up sophmore classes at junior colleges or at wacky hours just because of the overcrowding. Just getting classes was responsible for at lease one semester of dealay in my graduation. Beer, girls and fraternity life can be blamed for the rest.[/quote]
Here’s another tip. Take classes at JC instead of AP class. Not all AP class (at least back when I went to college) can be used to replace UCSD’s GE class but JC class are 100% transferable. So, I only took about 3-4 AP classes. But I took so many JC class that I cleared almost all of my GE, which is about a year worth of classes. That allow me to only need to take 3 classes each quarter and still graduate in 4. Which then allow me to work more during school, so I have a lot of working experiences by the time I graduate college. Not just summer intern.
