> And I remember thinking, "What a dumb thing to fixate upon! My school didn't offer APs, so I couldn't take the courses. And the test was only $75 and could let me place out of several thousand dollars of college credit, so I'm not going to let something silly like not having taken the course stop me."
If I were an admissions officer, I'd be a lot more impressed by that line of reasoning than by the result. When I was in high school, AP exams had this impenetrable mystique about them, like they're the Weighing of the Heart in Duat or something. From the perspective of the school administrators it was even more ridiculous. My school didn't offer AP Comp Sci, but I wanted to the take the AP exam anyway. When I asked the principal about it, he almost went into conniptions, because if I failed the exam it would mean that the school would be on public record with a 0% pass rate. Eventually I got him to agree to let me take the introductory CS course at the local community college for high school credit, and then take the lower-level of the two Comp Sci exams offered. (This was a fantastic deal for me, because it meant I got to leave that hellhole two hours early every day, and then sit down in the computer lab at BCC, ssh into my home computer, and play Nethack while the instructor gave his sixth lecture on 'for' loops.)
The mystique is total bullshit, of course. AP exams test a very small body of knowledge that you can acquire by sitting down with a Barrons or Princeton Review book for a week or two. The Calculus and Physics exams are a partial exception, because they require some degree of understanding rather than just regurgitation, but that degree is minimal. The fact that you saw through this charade speaks a lot more highly of your character than your scores do.
If I were an admissions officer, I'd be a lot more impressed by that line of reasoning than by the result. When I was in high school, AP exams had this impenetrable mystique about them, like they're the Weighing of the Heart in Duat or something. From the perspective of the school administrators it was even more ridiculous. My school didn't offer AP Comp Sci, but I wanted to the take the AP exam anyway. When I asked the principal about it, he almost went into conniptions, because if I failed the exam it would mean that the school would be on public record with a 0% pass rate. Eventually I got him to agree to let me take the introductory CS course at the local community college for high school credit, and then take the lower-level of the two Comp Sci exams offered. (This was a fantastic deal for me, because it meant I got to leave that hellhole two hours early every day, and then sit down in the computer lab at BCC, ssh into my home computer, and play Nethack while the instructor gave his sixth lecture on 'for' loops.)
The mystique is total bullshit, of course. AP exams test a very small body of knowledge that you can acquire by sitting down with a Barrons or Princeton Review book for a week or two. The Calculus and Physics exams are a partial exception, because they require some degree of understanding rather than just regurgitation, but that degree is minimal. The fact that you saw through this charade speaks a lot more highly of your character than your scores do.