Does It Matter Which AP Courses You Take?

A study of more than 11,700 college applicants found that only six particular Advanced Placement courses correlate with a noteworthy college admissions boost, while another six appear to have no impact on whether students get into colleges.

The study, conducted by college consulting company Empowerly using a database of the firm’s clients, found that Calculus BC—the second of two AP Calculus courses—appeared to have the biggest impact, increasing a student’s likelihood of admission by 5.2 percent compared to students with a comparable GPA who hadn’t taken the class. The other AP courses that appeared to help were psychology (+4.6 percent), biology (+4.6 percent), chemistry (+4.5 percent), English language (+4 percent) and statistics (+3.2 percent). The data dates back to 2021.

Other courses were associated with significant boosts but lacked a large enough sample size to know for sure, according to the report. Those include comparative government, which only 85 students in the database took, but which appeared to increase a student’s chance of admission by a massive 32.7 percent. Only 34 students took AP Latin, but students in that group were 22.1 percent more likely to be admitted.

With the report, Empowerly aimed to better understand which AP courses are most valuable for getting into selective colleges. Most selective institutions consider course rigor in their admissions decisions, though most take into account that not all AP courses are available at every school. But the question about which and how many AP courses students should take to find the most success in the admissions process is a complex one that varies from institution to institution.

The topic “comes up every single year,” said Empowerly founder Changxiao Xie, “because whenever families are going through course selection, they always have to ask the question, ‘Which courses should I take? What courses are going to help impact admissions, especially around my major?’”

Those decisions can also have high stakes for students’ academic success; students who feel pressure to take too many AP courses could sacrifice other opportunities or end up in courses they can’t pass. Trevor Packer, who leads the AP program for College Board, told EdWeek in 2023 that between 2 and 3 percent of high schoolers take “large” numbers of AP courses.

“Our own research shows that is not necessary for college readiness,” he said. “Simply taking one or two AP classes at most per year of high school optimizes the type of college readiness that comes from taking that type of challenging class.”

But historically, it has been difficult to understand the impact of specific AP classes on admissions because that data isn’t readily available. That’s why the staff at Empowerly decided to use their own data to study the issue.

The report acknowledges that the correlation doesn’t necessarily mean that these classes directly caused more students to be admitted. The research doesn’t control for other possible confounding variables, such as whether students who took courses like Calculus BC also took a higher number of AP courses in general—though Empowerly told Inside Higher Ed the company hopes to dive further into how the number of AP courses affects admissions in the future.

Stephanie Owen, an economics professor at Colby College who has studied AP courses, said she wouldn’t draw significant conclusions from the report about the impact of individual courses on admissions.

“There are reasons why we would think that certain subjects might matter more in admissions than others. It could be that they are signaling certain abilities of students; it could be that admissions officers are trying to balance across majors,” she said. “I think it’s something it would be nice to know more about, but, unfortunately, I don’t think this report tells us that for sure. But I think it’s definitely worth looking into more.”

Past research on the impacts of the AP program has been mixed, Owen said. Students who pass AP exams are more likely to graduate college on time, indicating that the program is meeting its goal of helping students get through college faster by skipping some general education courses. But it’s not as clear whether students who take the course but don’t take or pass the exam see those benefits. In her own research, Owen found that adding one extra AP course to a school did result in the most high-achieving students going to four-year schools at higher rates. The majority of students didn’t see a boost, though.

Empowerly’s findings also have implications for equity in admissions; just 33 percent of schools offer Calculus BC, the course correlated with the biggest admissions boost. Calculus AB, which is more common, was not correlated with such a bump.

Unequal access to rigorous classes has long been a concern for admissions experts; recent research out of the University of Michigan, which studied decisions in an admissions simulation, found that prospective engineering students were 16.4 percentage points less likely to be admitted if they hadn’t taken calculus, even if they couldn’t access the class.