Taking 20+ APs is Ruining Your Application?

The class selection sheet sits like a battlefield map on the kitchen table. AP Physics crossed out, then rewritten. Honors French replaced by AP Spanish Literature. Outside his Minneapolis home, an early November snow fell as Alex Patel made his final calculations. With his sophomore year first-semester grades still fresh in his mind—all A's except for one A- in honors chemistry—tomorrow's class selection deadline felt like a moment of truth. His dream of Stanford engineering seemed to hang on these decisions.

A generation ago, this kind of midnight anxiety over picking classes would have seemed bizarre. A decade ago, taking a single AP class was once considered exceptional, but now, students at competitive high schools across the nation routinely take at least four or five. 

APs: A Numbers Game

However, recent data from Harvard's admissions office reveals a surprising trend: among accepted students, the average number of AP classes hasn't increased in five years, even as application numbers have soared. Meanwhile, MIT's 2023 admissions report shows a focus on "depth of achievement" over "breadth of achievement." Furthermore, a Stanford survey found that while the number of students taking seven or more AP exams has doubled since 2015, acceptance rates at top universities haven't favored this maximalist approach. Stanford's studies show that beyond a certain threshold, typically five to seven AP courses in certain subject areas, additional AP classes don't meaningfully improve admission chances.

A shift is occurring in top college admissions, one that challenges the typical wisdom of loading up on as many AP/IB courses as possible.

"We're seeing diminishing returns from course overload," explains Liz Creighton, Dean of Admissions at Williams College. "Students who take seven or eight APs don't demonstrate anything more about their academic potential than those who take five or six in properly-chosen areas.”

In a comprehensive study of 10,000 applications across eight Ivy League schools, researchers found little to no advantage for students taking more than an average of five AP courses in their intended field of study. What did matter was performance and progression within those courses.

Quality > Quantity

College admissions officers are increasingly vocal about their preference for depth over breadth. "We'd rather see a student excel in four AP classes that align with their interests than spread themselves thin across seven or eight," says Olivia Whalen, Associate Director of Admissions at MIT. "It's not about the number of advanced courses – it's about how students engage with challenging material in their areas of passion."

This emphasis on quality over quantity reflects a broader shift in how elite institutions evaluate academic preparation. Traditional metrics like class rank and raw AP counts are giving way to more nuanced assessments of intellectual engagement and academic purpose.

Within this new paradigm, not all advanced courses carry equal weight. Admissions officers maintain an unofficial hierarchy of rigor that savvy college counselors have long understood.

"There's a clear stratification," explains Victoria Reeves, who spent twelve years in admissions at Caltech. "AP Calculus BC and Physics C carry more weight for a prospective engineering major than AP Psychology or Environmental Science. It's not about difficulty per se – it's about relevance and depth."

Educational researchers have also documented concerning trends among students pursuing maximum course loads. Another Stanford study found that students taking more than six AP courses simultaneously showed increased rates of anxiety, reduced sleep, and lower levels of actual subject engagement.

"We're seeing students who can handle the workload but aren't actually learning deeply," notes Dr. Robert Shah, who studies adolescent academic stress at Stanford's School of Education. "They're developing impressive endurance but not necessarily impressive understanding."

A Path Forward?

Elite colleges are sending clear signals about their preferences. Yale's latest admissions guidance explicitly states: "We prefer to see evidence of academic depth and sincere intellectual engagement rather than a pattern of advanced courses taken primarily to impress admissions officers."

This message is gradually reaching high schools. Phillips Academy Andover recently capped the number of AP classes students can take annually, emphasizing depth of learning over credential accumulation. Other prestigious prep schools are following suit.

As another course selection season approaches, the evidence seems to point to a clear conclusion: the path to a top college isn't found by maxing-out a course load but by a thoughtfully curating an academic focus. The challenge for today's high school students isn't balancing every possible AP/IB class, but having the focus and drive to choose the right ones.

However, the classic method of building a college application has long been outdated, with counselors and students stressing for hundreds of hours in a futile attempt to build a profile that’s both balanced and ambitious.

That’s where we come in. For the last four years, we’ve worked with tens of thousands of high schoolers to learn what parts of the application process they need the most help with. We took all that data and created a FREE app that helps you or your kid build a balanced college application.

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Best,

Joshua S.R.
Founder
75 Percent Chance