Advanced Placement. I am paying for them to do community college classes instead. Admission is relatively easy into our state colleges so they have no stress with that regard. Merit money is difficult to get (my older daughter is an exceptional student going into a major with few women - mechanical engineering- and she only got about half of her first year tuition in scholarships). The key is that we try to double count every possible community college class (for high school and college). This not only reduces the stress, but it cuts time off the back end of their time in college (2 1/2 years for my older daughter and possibly less than two years for my younger daughter who is looking at an accelerated BSNursing program). Another advantage is that you can split finals (college finals coming before the high school ones). Online classes also allow a student to control their time better by selecting, within a window, when to take an exam.

It is not a measure of worth. It is a matter of dollars. You can accomplish pretty much the same thing with a degree from a flagship state school as you can from an exclusive private school without the additional stress (this may not be the case in states like Michigan and Virginia though). I am thankful for our three state schools.

So if you take a dual credit class instead of an AP class, your GPA will be less than a student who gets the same grade in an AP class.

The highschool students feel "forced" into taking AP so they can have a better class ranking due to weighted credit for AP classes.

I think this is wrong.

it is straight scale 4.0. I suspect it was easier for my daughter to get As in her community college classes than the AP course at the High School, but some of her university classes were much harder than anything at the high school. She lost class ranking for an A- in Mechanics of Materials which is a sophomore/junior engineering level class in which only 15% of the class got an A.

The whole AP thing is pernicious because many of the more elite universities don't even accept the credit, but you cannot get into the university without taking the hardest offerings at your high school (you would be better to go to a high school which does not have an AP program). That means you are repeating the content in which you beat your head on in high school. You sometimes end of taking two AP tests in the same day which is incredibly stressful (imagine spending a year studying a class and getting nothing for it).

I was talking with my niece tonight at my daughter's graduation open house. She took AP Composition in high school which did absolutely nothing for her at her university or the university in which my daughter will be attending. My daughter took Comp I and Comp II at a community college so she won't have a composition class at a the university. AP Biology does not satisfy any science or engineering degree requirements. You have to get a 4 or 5 to even get one semester of Chemistry (my daughter took Chemistry I at our regional university instead). The AP Psychology takes a year to get one semester credit. The AP Calculus class takes a year to get one semester credit (you also have to take a Precalculus class first so it is a 1 1/2 year investment for one semester).

In Iowa the universities have strong articulation agreements with the community colleges. That way you know what classes count towards a degree before you take them. That is good and bad. No doubt my daughter has had a couple of classes which are not sufficiently rigorous enough to prepare her for getting As in upper engineering classes, but on the other hand I am working with her to prepare for those engineering classes. Her Engineering Physics II course had 23 students in it - 22 of them were sophomore-senior engineering majors at the university she will be attending, while she, as the 23rd, was a high school senior.

It is the mission of colleges to slow you down and force you to take as long as possible to get your degree. I pushed really hard to get my daughter scheduled in her first semester classes (two junior and two sophomore engineering classes). Without me pushing I feel it is likely that they would have told her that these courses were closed.

I know my daughter had a much more relaxing final semester than many of her peers. She really only had one class which pushed her (Engineering Statistics). Most of her semester was wrapped up when AP test taking time rolled around.

I don't know of a single college or university that takes weighted GPAs. They all make the schools refigure the grades based on straight 4.0 scale. That's why both numbers show up on the transcript and why the admissions page makes sure to point out that the GPA ranges they list are based on unweighted numbers.

The only possible help would come from scholarship applications, and even many of those require a real GPA, not a weighted one.

If you're in the top 10% or whatever, you might get a small scholarship. More and more of those scholarships really aren't worth much any more, and frankly, you can get more with a good essay or two you recycle and reuse for many scholarship applications.

You don't have to worry about your SAT score or ACT score.
http://www.collegeforalltexans.com/index.cfm?objectid=6D0B8C2F-C987-12B0-27CAFED91FACC7FB

Many states that had similar programs have since cut them due to lack of funds.

Sure, colleges ask about it, but honestly, from what I have been told by admissions reps (I usually teach junior and senior English and work with admissions reps to get my kids into the programs they want), it's either not a consideration or such a small one when all else is figured in.

In my experience I have found the parents defending AP the most are the ones who pushed their kids too far.

They want to brag that their kid is taking xxxx number of AP classes. And their kids are depressed, stressed out, and burned out.

See "Race to Nowhere". I am not the only one who has seen the impact on our kids.

It's abuse...

Don't get me wrong, I love working with the vast majority of them, but there are those few...