Worth the Weight- Why honors, IB, and AP classes are worth it.

You’re sitting in a conference room in the admissions office of a college, and the information session is coming to a close. There’s room for just a few questions. You get the usual “What is the med school acceptance rate” and, “Are the dorms air conditioned?” You get a few funny ones, “Why is your mascot so frightening to look at?”
And you get the inevitable one, “Would you rather an A in a regular class or a B in an AP class?”

9 schools out of 10 will answer “I’d rather an A in an AP class”

While this answer is infinitely frustrating, because it doesn’t answer your question, it does give the honest answer.

You should be taking the hardest classes you can handle, and you should be doing well in them.

Highly rigorous classes are there to get you ready for college level work. Even when they claim to be college level work (like APs) they’re not quite that (you’ll understand when you get to school) but they’re a stepping-stone.

Admissions are looking to see that you’re succeeding in your environment, and that you’ll have success in theirs.

What does this mean?

They want the best of the best. So they want to see you challenging yourself to high-level classes, and rising to the level of work expected of you.
Showing that you can kick APUSH’s vocab heavy behind bodes well for you doing well in their history classes. Schools don’t want to see you fail, they want to see you flourish, and doing well in high school indicates that you will.

And to answer your question, with proper documentation that you really worked hard, B that you worked your butt off for in AP bio is worth a whole lot more than taking the easy way out for an A (though, AP Environmental was a very cool class).

Easy way out?

While this highly depends on your school, at least at my high school, the “honors” and “AP” classes were leaps and bounds more challenging than the regular classes. That’s why they’re weighted in your GPA, you’re doing more work and the grades are harder to get.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t take a regular class if you truly can’t handle the harder work (I took regular foreign language junior and senior year, and regular chemistry sophomore year).

But if you are going to be getting an easy A in a regular class, you should sign up for the honors one. It will be tricky. It will be frustrating. But it will be a challenge and it will leave you better prepared for college.

So know that hard classes are worth the weight. They demonstrate that you are ready for college level work, and that you don’t back down from a challenge even when there is an easier path.

Colleges want to see you challenge yourself, the worst thing you can do is coast.