Every year students enroll themselves in an Advanced Placement (AP) Course in hopes of earning college credit, but recently students this year have discovered that not all colleges accept AP credit.
“It is very difficult to provide information about what universities take or don’t take because there are just so many different schools,” Social Studies teacher Mrs. Skyler Kim said.
Mrs. Kim teaches both honors and AP government classes, and has been told that about 80 percent of four year institutions accept the credit. Many colleges also accept credit through the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), which is the credit students receive if they take honors rather than AP. This credit is acquired through the UMSL website where they can register for the class they are currently enrolled in by paying a fee about half the cost of a typical class in college.
“When I found out I could also get credit through honors I was a little mad and originally planned to drop down into honors,” junior Jessie Saurwein said.
Saurwein later decided to stay with the AP course in order to challenge herself. However, she does think that the students going into AP need to be better informed on which colleges will take their AP credits.
“Generally I would say that I wasn’t well informed about the class before I took it and they should make it clear that you can get college credit through honors too,” Saurwein said.
Although college credit can be acquired through both AP and honors classes the AP course does hold some advantages. More colleges accept the AP credit than the UMSL credit because of the AP test that students must earn a four or five on to receive college credit. This test is supposedly proof of how well the student has learned the information in the class.
“I decided to take AP because I wanted to challenge myself even more while simultaneously gaining college credit for the class,” junior Samishka Maililpwar said.
These credits are not accepted by a majority of private and elite colleges. However, private institutions will heavily consider that a more challenging course was taken.
“AP classes challenge students to perform at their highest levels,” Kim said. “Colleges want to see students pushing themselves and the AP test shows the hard work they have put into a course.”
Students are also offered more a challenge in an AP course than an honors.
“We move a lot faster and have more reading, writing and analysis than the honors classes,” Kim said.
AP classes can be beneficial if you do plan to go to a college that accepts the credits. Junior Rachel Berwald plans to use her AP credits in Government and US History to skip introductory courses as well as whole classes at the college she plans to attend.
“It’s definitely a bigger workload and you go at a faster pace than in honors, but you really learn a lot and the content is interesting,” Berwald said.
