Are There Benefits To Taking Advanced Placement Courses?

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You might be wondering whether or not there are any benefits to taking Advanced Placement courses if you are going to be entering your senior year of high school next year (or if you have a child who is going to be entering their senior year of high school); after all, an important part of a college admissions package will be your grades, and even though Advanced Placement courses will present a challenge and help you to learn new things, they will also be more difficult, and can therefore cause your grades to drop - and of course, this begs the question, "Is it worth it to take AP courses?"

One thing that will be helpful for you to understand, when it comes to answering the question of how "worth it" Advanced Placement courses are, is the way in which colleges view admissions packets; while grades are certainly part of the admissions process, they are not the most important part!

Because of the fact that there are so many different high schools across the country that use so many different standards as far as education goes, colleges really cannot put a lot of weight on a student's grades, as grades will mean different things from school to school; because of this, colleges have to find other areas to place importance upon, and one area most colleges use is standardized tests (the SAT and the ACT). And of course, the other area they use is the "extras" in a student's admissions packet; such extracurricular activities as National Honor Society, leadership-related seminars and clubs, and participation in community service all tally among these "extras," but another big part of these "extras" is the effort a student displays toward gaining as much knowledge as they can through extra school work and courses that are deemed more difficult.

This means that the positives of having Advanced Placement courses in a student's admissions packet will far outweigh the potential negatives of slightly lowered grades that can come as a result of taking these courses; what's more, if the Advanced Placement courses in question properly prepare their students for the Advanced Placement test that will be taken at the end of the year, these students will be able to pass the test, and will therefore be able to skip these classes in college - which all adds up to mean that Advanced Placement courses are worth a high school senior's time and effort to take!