How are the AP scores sent to the colleges? Do they know about all the tests a student takes or is it just the ones the student informs them about? If the student gets a 1 on an AP test, will the college know about it?
Generally they self-report until after they enroll, and then send an official score report. This keeps the cost down, as each send carries a fee. Self reporting is a new thing, and its nice. Obviously, a student who misrepresented their scores would have their acceptance rescinded.
They don’t generally have to disclose all scores, though there may be some school that requires it. As a rule, AP scores are only relevant to admissions when they don’t have other ways to assess academic readiness. So a kid coming from a BFE high school that has never had a student apply to a particular college before, and who has not submitted SAT or ACT scores, or whose scores are below the average for that institution, might really need to show good AP scores. A kid at posh private school that sends tons of kids to a particular college doesnt need them at all, because they know what the trascript means.
As to the AP courses I took in high school:
Calc AB and Calc BC - very useful for anyone going into math, science or engineering, allowing you to skip the classes in college. I was able to start in Calc 3, which I had studied on my own my senior year, but felt I didn’t really learn it well enough to be able to test out of it, even assuming that was an option.
Chemistry - I honestly don’t recall much about this. I took one chemistry course in college, placing out of the intro course, and ended up hating it, then basically forgot everything related to chemistry over the next 20 years. Somehow the school let me take a higher level class, but didn’t give me credit right away, so while most of the AP classes on my transcript say “AP whatever”, for Chemistry the name of the course I placed out of was used.
Art History - I loved this course even though I thought I would hate it and mainly took it because it was an AP course that I could take. I got credit for it, but it didn’t place me out of anything, as there wasn’t an equivalent course on the same material, and the courses that covered the material were at a higher level. I took one course in college in this for distros and I’m not sure why I didn’t take more. Maybe I was sick of writing papers. Looking at my transcript, I took it in the fall of my second year, not my first year as I had remembered, so I think I just was focused more on my major’s classes after that as I took the last preliminary math course that term that opened up all the high level classes.
Physics (?) - We only managed to cover mechanics in class before the exam as it was open to people who never had any physics before as long as they were taking (or had taken) calculus, so we only took a small portion of the test. I had this listed on my college transcript, but got no credit. It again wouldn’t have placed me out of anything, and I didn’t take anything else in college.
English Literature - The only one I got anything lower than a 5 on. I only managed a 4 most likely because I suck at analyzing literature, but that was good enough for credit. The Language version I’m pretty sure could have gotten a 5 on, and that would have placed out of what they called the “writing requirement” which required at the time doing something that proved you knew how to write well. I ended up taking an in-person hand written essay to try to place out of it and absolutely bombed even though I had no problems writing - it’s just that in-person handwritten essays were mostly a thing of the past by now, even 20 years ago. I was much more used to writing on computers with cut and paste and all that, which made it harder to write by hand when required to.
US Government - I completely forgot that our state-mandated government course also prepared us to take the AP exam, and only recalled it when looking at my transcript to refresh my memory. I did end up taking a comparative government course in college, but I don’t think you needed to have AP US Government to do that, so all I got was credit.
So that was 6 classes I got credit for, but only Math and Chemistry “saved time” in terms of going towards a major in them. Distros couldn’t be fulfilled with AP credits, so I didn’t get to take less arts & lit classes for getting credit for AP English, so I only really saved time overall in how many semesters I had to attend. I ended up missing most of one year due to illness, but could have still graduated “on time” if I hadn’t had another illness my last term. It did save me 2/3 of a year of tuition at a very expensive school, so I think it was definitely worth it. And being at a small school for the gifted, pretty much everyone took this many AP courses, as there literally was very little else to take.
If anything, it’d make a lot more sense to make statistics the advanced freshman class, and put the calc later.
What’s the first class where they start seeing proofs?
I took Calculus in high school, and I took the AP Calculus test (don’t remember how well I did), but I think the class was just called “Calculus,” not “AP Calculus,” if it matters. The teacher I had definitely didn’t teach to the AP test. We got a lot of proofs (and deltas and epsilons and all that fun theoretical stuff) in that class, because that was what he liked and he wanted to teach it that way. It was great for a future math major like me, but it’s not a very common way of teaching introductory Calculus, especially at the high school level.
But the first class where I started seeing proofs was Geometry, which was all proofs.
But where is the fun in that? Again, we aren’t trying to be efficient. It is just that ypung math nerds want to learn calculus because they can.
I don’t know where they do proofs.
Depends on how advanced the stats class is, right? If they’re doing probability density functions and things like that, it would make sense to have it after calculus.
AP stats only has A2 as a pre-requisite. Hieever, there is a lot of writing and explaining, and as in Physics 1, in many ways thats much more of a challenge for younger learners than being able to do the math.