More than 50% of the class of 2029 took at least seven Advanced Placement courses and five exams in high school, according to data from The Herald’s First-Year Poll.
Brown, like many highly-selective colleges, does not accept passing scores on these exams as a substitute for academic credit — a key feature for why some students opt to enroll in these college-level courses in the first place. Despite this pitfall, common knowledge dictates that students must take APs to be admitted to highly selective colleges, compelling high-achieving high schoolers to enroll in the courses to make their application competitive.
Instead of credit, the University allows students to use AP credit to place into higher-level courses in some departments.
University Spokesperson Brian Clark explained in an email to The Herald that “Brown’s approach to AP credits is not an administrative policy of the University,” but is “a curriculum decision under the purview of the Brown faculty.”
Cathleen Sheils, the senior director of college consulting and consultant training at Solomon Admissions Consulting and a former director of undergraduate admissions at Cornell, said that elite universities “don’t see (AP exams) as a replacement for their courses.”
She added that these universities often view AP courses as rigorous preparation for their curricula, but not challenging enough to serve as replacements.
Sara Harberson, a former Penn admission officer who founded a private college admission consulting company, believes that “money and elitism” are why elite colleges don’t accept AP credits.
“If a college gives students credit for AP exams, they lose money on that student,” she wrote in an email to The Herald. “That student could graduate early and not spend as much on tuition as a result.”
Clark wrote that Brown’s policies are “certainly not focused on revenue.”
“The student has to take as many APs that are available to them to get into an elite college, but getting AP credit for those courses is slim to none,” Harberson added.
Universities value AP classes on a transcript, but to increase their chances of admission to an elite institution, students should take both AP courses and the corresponding exams, Sheils said. If an admissions officer doesn’t see an AP test on file for a class on the student’s transcript, they may assume the student didn’t take the test — or worse, that the student did poorly.
Harberson offered a different perspective. When families raise concerns about the adverse effects of not submitting AP scores, she tells them that “a college can’t hold a score against a student if they don’t see it,” she said.
Clark said Brown’s admissions team “prefers to see that students have opted for the more rigorous approach to their high school education, which in many high schools means pursuing an AP or IB version of a course.”
Sara Sympson, the director of communications at the College Board, the company that administers the AP tests and curricula, wrote in an email to The Herald that “we respect the credit-granting policies that individual colleges and universities establish for their own institutions.”
Jacob Spears ’29 was able to use his AP credits to skip the introductory courses for calculus, biology and chemistry at Brown. Joseph McGonagle ’29 also used his AP Calculus credit to bypass Brown’s introductory math classes.
But Spears wrote in an email to The Herald that he was “upset” when he discovered that Brown did not accept AP courses for credit. “We are told we need to take as many AP classes as we can” to be considered for admission by Brown, Spears said. When he found out Brown didn’t take the credit, it felt “sly,” Spears said.
For McGonagle, though, Brown’s policy was unsurprising: “I was under the assumption during high school that taking many APs and doing well in them was simply the bar for entry to an Ivy League.”
Teddy Fisher is a senior staff writer who studies International and Public Affairs and is passionate about law, national security and sports. He enjoys playing basketball, running and reading in his free time.
