Love of Learning: APs, Demographics, and Advice

Do self-studied APs make you more competitive?

I'm in a great school that offers a few APs. I have a perfect GPA. The cap allows me to take 7, which I plan to. I plan to self study but the college counselor discourages me. I actually LOVE learning and I am NOT taking the APs just for a number. I do want my self-studying efforts to be recognized.

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I was asked to answer this question on the website Quora.com

From the description you provide, you will already have completed the most competitive program at your school by the time you graduate. Admission officers will record this achievement in some way early on in your evaluation. Every study that has been deemed credible demonstrates that academic program combined with GPA provides the best prediction of success in university  classes. Of course, as you no doubt know, highly selective schools will look at far more than your academic program and perfect grades. If I had to guess I would say be your standardized testing is strong too.  All told, academically, you have what it takes to get a close read at any highly selective university or college.

I am, however, going to address some things that might affect the decision whether you want to take the self-study APs or do something else instead.  I know what I am going to write is politically incorrect, but that does not mean it might not be worth thinking about (or responding to, for those who disagree).

You attend a small private school that has a strong reputation among colleges and universities. That is the good news. But it is also true that you attend a small private school in a posh community. By this I mean that you are going to be held to higher standards because of your privilege (unless you are on a scholarship and low income.) If you read the comments by many in education today, including those in admission, the label of privilege is applied to students in ways that make it clear that there is at least modest disdain and in some cases outright hostility to students who are perceived to have an unfair advantage over those who do not have the economic class or educational background to attend private school or enroll in private test prep, or a host of other things that almost all cost money. Your zip code and school are not necessarily going to curry favor among all admission officers. There are far too many counselors that throw the term privilege around as though it were a fault to live in a community and family with substantial resources. Orwell might well have written about this were he alive today.

In addition, you are in a couple of other bad demographics. You are in New Jersey and you are a female. I grew up in New Jersey and loved it, so I am not putting down the Garden State, but the reality is the population density is high and there are not nearly enough highly selective colleges, either public or private, to fulfill the demand. There are many great secondary schools across the State; as a result, a lot of students from New Jersey end up applying to the same set of selective schools. If you are not aware, geographical diversity is a factor in admission decisions. It is not a huge factor but it certainly does come into play in highly selective admission where even small factors end up counting for a lot.  You are, therefore, going to be competing with the top students in your State (and to a similar degree, to the students in your secondary school too, as many colleges evaluate  applicants within individual secondary school groups In other words if 10 students from your school apply to the same university the school will, if it is very highly selective, not offer admission to many of them no matter how good the schools—see the acceptance rates to Stanford and the Ivies for magnet schools like Thomas Jefferson High Schools for Science and Technology –what many say is the best school in the US, for some data to support this claim.  U Penn, for example, initially evaluates applicants within their  school group. Selective colleges want to make sure they do not offer to “too many” students from one particular school.

It’s also true that females, on average, outperform males in the classroom in secondary school. Most colleges have “goals” (they would never have exact quotas as this would lead to lawsuits) in terms of the male/female ratio that they wish to enroll even if it means being more selective for female applicants. The discrepancy between the selectivity expected from males compared to females is particularly true of some small liberal arts colleges, but it is also true of some of the highly selective universities. (Of course, this is not a topic you will ever hear about in an college information session, so you will have to do some sleuthing to find out the different acceptance rates between men and women. You might ask this in an information session, but if you do don’t give your name. I am sort of kidding….)

I wish I could say what I have written above is the end of the discouraging preface to my answer to your specific question. But the stats that have been reported in the NY Times and other places are compelling in what they demonstrate.  Asian students have to have better numerical academic credentials than any other group, by a long shot. 

 

Things have improved a bit at the Ivies after lawsuits were filed, but the acceptance rate, and enrollment figures compared to the overall performance of Asians at top secondary schools around the US (and the world), the percentage of Asians should be much higher (see the percentage of Asians at the U Cal system, for example, since these schools are, by law, not supposed  to use race in admission--nearly half the students a Berkeley and UCLA are Asian). [1] 

Given the stats and the research there is, at the very least, some unconscious bias against Asians. This sad fact will not change any time soon. There is very little advocacy for Asians within the secondary school or college admission communities. In fact, there are many in the profession who believe there are too many Asian at magnet secondary schools  and places like UCLA and hope to use “holistic admission” in order to alter the racial composition of the schools. Major media rarely cover this issue. Because of the vague criteria that fall under the rubric of holistic admission, it is very difficult to to prove overt discrimination.  Readers are taught to never write anything down that would hurt them in court but the underlying message is clear at least to some who have read for highly selective schools. But even when there is a story that details how schools subtly discriminate there is no public outcry I do not see the courts siding with Asian applicants and then awarding damages to them --something I have commented on in Harvard Magazine.

Therefore, given that you are going to be held to higher academic standards, it may be to your advantage to do the extra APs in order to help you rise above the “typical” Asian student who is at the top of the class and taking the toughest courses the school offers. It shows you have gone beyond the norm of exceptional performance and courses. Or it might not.

I will finally get around to your question with just one more digression. Given your last name (the one who asked me to answer this question), you have at least some Chinese heritage. I mention this since you may not be aware that in the Mainland there are hundreds of students taking AP exams who have never taken an AP course. This is due, mostly, to the fact that the schools the students attend to do not offer APs. The typical AP choices for these students in China doing self-study are Calculus, Science (Biology, Chemistry, or Physics)  and American History. I have always been surprised at students in China who study for a couple of months during their final exam period of a very rigorous junior year and then earn a 4 or 5 in American History. (It would make an interesting research paper to find out what the average AP US History score is in China. My guess would be the mean score is higher than the average score in the US. The College Board is not wild about Chinese students taking APs without being in the classes, especially when they earn high scores—it undermines the description of the AP as the equivalent of a full semester college course. And it affects the income College Board brings in for the course materials etc.) 

I mention this because there will be some admission people reading your application who will lump you in with this group of students and assume you are taking these exams in order to show you are hard working, smart, and have standardized proof of specific subject matter There is a lot of suspicion that transcripts out of China are not accurate and there is good reason to believe this. Many admission readers are jaded when it comes to reading applications from China for a whole set of reasons, both justified and unjustified, that I won’t go into here. (I have written a lot about this elsewhere). But as to your case in particular, while you may not be judged guilty by association, you also may not be credited for taking the APs because you love to learn, in part because of the Asian bias and in part because of the China bias.

If it seems I have discouraged you from taking APs on your own let me see if I can at least make a case for why you might wish to take them and how they might be recognized as a positive factor by the schools you hope to attend. More than a decade ago the meme that made its way around the information sessions and marketing materials of highly selective schools was “Love of Learning”.  Every selective college school foregrounded this attribute as the quality that helped students to stand out among bright students with good numbers.

Mount Holyoke College is looking for smart, ambitious women who understand the value of a liberal arts education and who are driven by a love of learning. 

 As is typical when a meme filters down and across to a large audience,  however, it became a formula rather than a useful descriptive term for individual students to describe themselves outside the numbers. The term has, nevertheless, changed the experience of almost all the students’ lives who hope to get accepted to highly selective schools.

Figuring out how to game a way to demonstrate Love of Learning became “the way to get in”. One common approach to demonstrate LOL was to pile on AP courses; coursework and grades are, as stated above, the best predicators of academic success and are easy to quantify for admission officers. For example, at one highly selective university I know of, the readers ‘ evaluation form included check boxes for which AP courses the student had taken along with the scores earned on any completed prior to senior year. These data points featured prominently the decisions that were made. Therefore, those students who wished to gain entry to the most selective universities and colleges began to take on much heavier academic loads in terms of APs and even post AP classes such as multivariable calculus and organic chemistry. At the same time, the College Board was promoting the AP program by increasing the number of APs offered in a range of subjects while also encouraging all schools to be a part of the AP program. It is no surprise that more and more students starting taking APs, and doing so at an earlier point in secondary schools. It used to be very rare to see students in any AP classes in 10^th grade. Now it is not unusual in students that send the vast majority of students on to 4 years schools to see students with 2 or 3 in 10^th, 3 or 4 in 11^th and 5 or more in 12^th. Students with 10 or more APs, once almost unheard of, are a part of the top 5-10 percent of any given secondary school class in wealthy suburbs or good private schools.

There has been pushback, however, by colleges who say that the students are jumping through hoops instead of doing what they are passionate about .(Passion is a relatively new meme but it too may have passed its sell by date. Passion slowly gave way to “grit” about 4 years ago, but this term now seems to have largely disappeared too in favor of the deliberately vague duo of  “overcoming obstacles” and “community engagement”.

With applications going up each year and the competition getting such that fewer than 10% of students are accepted, those who wish to stand out are willing to do what they think it takes to get in to the top ranked schools, including loading up on an increasing number of APs. Recently, There has been some blowback about students taking too many APs and there is some data that suggests beyond a certain number (5 or 6) they do not increase the predictive value for academic success. A report last year out of the Harvard graduate school of education,  Turning the Tide, recommended that admission offices look beyond things like APs and that students should not pile them on. While this is a nice sentiment it is not pragmatically realistic. 2

 It is unlikely that students will get penalized for taking more than 5 APs and unless the student does not do much except study having more APs is more impressive than having just a few—if you are in the toughest  subgroups vying for admission.  

I mention this as you will be compared to the white and Asian kids who go to these high schools and who have taken 10 or more APs. Of course, it’s not as if Asians are all interchangeable cogs, but given the fact that schools get 30,000 or more applications for a few thousand spaces applications it is hard to distinguish the minutiae of individual students in the way that schools often tout as their holistic methodology. Your having upped your AP count will assure readers that you are not a slacker taking “only” 7 APs. If this sounds like hyperbole, I have seen comments by readers at a competitive university who have written “only 6 APs” in their evaluations, and that was over 5 years ago. The competition has only increased since that time.

I have spent a lot of time on what I would call the macroscopic view of how the admission process works with respect to APs and groups of students. What I have written applies to the thousands of students who fit within your demographic profile. But now let me spend a little bit on how you might take the APs and help yourself significantly as an individual.

First of all, before I would give you a definitive answer to your question, I would want to know a lot more specific information about you. It is easy to give advice in general terms ,but you have experiences and circumstances that do not fit into the generic descriptions I have given. For example, if you had a choice between self-studying for the APs or taking some MOOCs (Massive On-line Open Courses) instead, I am not sure  yet how I would respond. You could take MOOC coding classes if that was an interest you had—something not offered on any AP exam. There are thousands of great MOOCs out there. But some in admission are cynical about these because they think students may be gaming the process by saying they have taken them. Certificates might help dispel this preconception and they may be less expensive than the AP test fees.

Or maybe you have the opportunity to do some sort of activity (I hate to name any specifically as some readers would assume the ones I name are the ‘right’ ones), that would permit you to develop one of your talents or interests be it academic, the arts  service etc. Or is it possible you could do some research in a field that you have an interest in. Or maybe you cold do an internship to find out more about a potential career field. Only after talking with you and seeing what options you have and what things you are interested in would it make a lot sense to give you specific advice that will help you develop skills that will help you not so much as an applicant to schools but as a person who really is interested in learning.

On the other hand, in this age of private counselors taking on students as early as grade school, things have gotten way out of hand as far as shaping children into the mold of the successful applicants to highly selective universities. I would advise you to step away from the hype and do what I advise all students to do when making choices about programs, colleges, and lots else—go Buddhist. The Buddhist saying, first thought, best thought applies here. If you really love learning, then show it. The APs might be one way, but you will also need to get some back up. I hope your college counselor can underscore this in the recommendation letter and I hope that your teachers will support this too. In addition, your essays may be opportunity to demonstrate your love of learning in concrete ways (do not say “I love learning”—demonstrate it in the story you share). In other words, your application should have support for your love of learning that extends far beyond the APs. If you do this, then all the negative things I have mentioned above will pale into the background. Now that Love of Learning is not mentioned nearly as often as it used to be, your demonstration of it in your application may be a welcome thing (it would be for me if I were reading your application).

Finally, I would also say that you should try to make sure you interview at the schools that offer them. If you have a genuine love of learning you can get this across in an interview. I have seen this hundreds of times over the years. It is not that hard  see the academic fire when a student begins to talk about something they really love.

You should also know that almost no matter what you are going to get into a good university. Your hard work has already paid off. If, however,  you define good as top 10, then you are in for a lot of stress and possible heartache, but if you expand your list a bit you will find that what have accomplished will be rewarded.

Best of luck. 

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1. This problem is especially prevalent in Ivy League colleges, shown by a complaint filed by the Asian-American Coalition for Education (AACE) against many such schools. This complaint claims that Admissions officers “often treat Asian-American applicants as a monolithic block rather than as individuals, and denigrate these applicants as lacking in creativity/critical thinking and leadership skills/risk taking.” (AACE v. Yale, Brown and Dartmouth) The statistics prove that the applicants are entirely capable, after the Department of Education started investigating Harvard, admission rates jumped from 10.8% to 16.1% (for Asian applicants). The same effect was shown at Princeton after a student complaint, with rates jumping from 14.7% to 25.4% (Douglas Belkin, 5/23/16)

2.The following report offers specific recommendations for reshaping the admissions process in each of the following three areas: 

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND SERVICE The admissions process should both clearly signal that concern for others and the common good are highly valued in admissions and describe what kinds of service, contributions and engagement are most likely to lead to responsible work, caring relationships and ethical citizenship. 

1 Promoting more meaningful contributions to others, community service and engagement with the public good. 

2 Assessing students’ ethical engagement and contributions to others in ways that reflect varying types of family and community contributions across race, culture and class. 

3 Redefining achievement in ways that both level the playing field for economically diverse students and reduce excessive achievement pressure

Recommendation #2:

Awareness of Overloading on AP/IB Courses

Admissions offices should convey to students that simply taking large numbers of AP or IB courses per year is often not as valuable as sustained achievement in a

limited number of areas. While some students can benefit from and handle large numbers of AP/IB courses, many students benefit from taking smaller numbers of advanced courses. Too often there is the perception that these students are penalized in the admissions process.