High school students today have many options to earn college credit before graduation. Advanced Placement classes and the International Baccalaureate diploma offer students valuable intellectual experiences and can contribute a great deal to the educational experience. These programs help to prepare students for the rigors of college studies.
No program is perfect and some high schools have dropped AP and IB class tracks altogether favoring a more flexible curriculum. Other schools elect to maintain both AP and IB classes while others give students the option of earning credits by taking online classes. Several higher education institutions offer online classes including Harvard and Indiana University.
My experience is that it does not really matter to admissions committees whether you are AP or IB credentialed, homeschooled, charter schooled or a valedictorian of your high school senior class. These groups go to great lengths to weigh every applicant as an individual. Generally speaking, how students are schooled does not penalize them in the admissions process. High school dropouts have made it into Harvard and Caltech.
Diversity counts. Students need not worry that because they live in a rural area they will not be able to compete against a rich suburban applicant. Or be concerned that if they are home schooled and have never set foot in a classroom that they will automatically be excluded. I have counseled a wide variety of clients and none have suffered at the hands of an admissions committee because of where they went to school.
When all is said and done it is the student’s overall grade point average that matters most. In fact, many state universities have automatic admission policies. Students that graduate in the top 10 percent of their class are automatically admitted, for example, into the University of Texas.
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Several state universities have fixed grades and test score cutoff lines. These two measures may determine who gets admitted to certain programs. Technical fields such as engineering and computer science cannot afford to admit students with low math scores and reject accordingly. Generally each college school or department determines what score is acceptable for credit.
Along with GPA and SAT scores, everything else in the student’s background is tallied to find the best possible applicant. Sports ability, legacy standing, proof of overcoming hardship, good performance on alumni interviews, musical talent and extracurricular accomplishments combine to make up a total picture that admissions committees review for each applicant.
AP classes and IB diplomas look good on your application, but test scores in many cases matter a great deal more than curriculum. The single most damaging deficiency in a college application is a low GPA or low SAT and ACT scores.
Gerald Bradshaw is an international college admissions consultant with Bradshaw College Consulting in Crown Point.