How Many AP Classes Should You Take? Finding the Right Balance for College Admissions & Student Wellbeing

What Are AP Classes and Why Do They Matter?

Advanced Placement (AP) courses are college-level courses, created and administered by the College Board, offered in over 23,000 secondary schools across the country. To earn college credit and demonstrate mastery of course material, students enrolled in AP classes take standardized AP exams, scored on a 1–5 scale, during the AP exam weeks in early May.

An AP exam score of 3 or higher is generally considered passing, and many colleges award course credit or advanced placement to students who surpass scoring thresholds on individual exams. As an example, at MIT, a student needs a 5 on BC Calculus to earn course credit, while a 3 on AB Calculus leads to credit at UC Boulder. The earned college credit allows students to skip introductory courses, explore more electives, add a minor, or even graduate early, leading to meaningful cost savings for families.

AP courses matter for several reasons. Rigorous course-taking allows students to differentiate themselves academically and demonstrate academic striving in the context of their high school.  Attaining strong grades in AP courses sends a signal of academic preparedness, which is bolstered by attaining strong scores on standardized AP exams. Many admissions offices use the level of academic rigor on a transcript as a benchmark to compare students within and across high schools. AP courses establish a standardized curriculum for exploring advanced material, and many students can learn more about themselves, their interests, and their abilities by participating in these advanced courses.

The Rise of AP Courses in U.S. High Schools

The Advanced Placement program has had a profound impact on the American high school curriculum. Since its humble beginnings in 1955—when some 1,200 students took a mere 2,200 exams—the AP has grown into a juggernaut, dominating the high school landscape: in 2025, 3,243,979 students from 23,664 high schools took an eye-popping 6,182,171 AP exams. This year’s total number of exams reflects an increase of over 400,000 exams from last year, including the 253,000 students who took AP Precalculus, the newest addition to the 42 available APs. By all measures, the AP is a dominant force in US education.

The patterns of AP course-taking have shifted dramatically over the past few decades. AP courses used to be the province of the most ambitious students, who took several AP courses to demonstrate strength in key areas. In 1990, only 330,000 students nationally took AP exams. Today, many students complete as many as a dozen AP courses, and at top schools, some of the most ambitious students are taking fourteen or fifteen AP courses. Here is a graph illustrating the number of students taking more than 9 exams in the most recent 4 years compared to a decade ago.

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In just three years, from 2022 to 2025, the growth in high-volume AP exam-taking has been remarkable. The number of students taking 9 AP exams grew 44%, and students taking 10 exams increased 50%. The growth accelerates further up the scale: students taking 12 exams rose 56%, 13 exams up 68%, and students taking 14 or more AP exams grew by over 70%. High fliers are undoubtedly pushing academic rigor as a means of standing out in a crowded admissions pool.

While 163,646 students took at least 9 AP exams in 2025, some students took AP exams to the extreme, exemplified by the two seniors who each completed over 30 AP exams! Give those kids ample credit for taking something too far.

How Many AP Classes Should You Take?

There is no single right answer to this question: the ideal number of AP courses depends on your school's offerings, your academic strengths, your intended college list, and your overall well-being. But research and admissions data offer useful guideposts.

AP Classes and Academic Rigor: What the Research Says

College admissions offices have long understood that there is a relationship between the courses a student takes in high school and their eventual college success. Clifford Adelman, a research analyst for the Department of Education, has made significant contributions to the understanding of this relationship through his comprehensive 1999 study, Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and Bachelor's Degree Attainment, and his follow-up 2006 study, The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion From High School Through College. Adelman found that academic intensity, what we call rigor, had the strongest relationship with college degree completion, higher than high school GPA or standardized test scores.

The College Board entered the research arena and, in 2012, created an Academic Rigor Index (ARI) based on course-taking in honors, dual-enrollment, and AP classes. College Board researchers found that although the rigor index was a statistically significant predictor of college grades, it did not rise to the predictive strength of either high school GPA or SAT scores.

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, conducted institutional research on the relationship between AP, IB, and Dual Enrollment course-taking and freshman-year college grades. Students with zero college-level classes in high school had average freshman year GPAs of 3.07. As students took one, two, or three AP courses, their future college freshman GPA began to climb. Students with five advanced classes had average GPAs of 3.26, but after that, the increase leveled off. Students who took ten of these courses still averaged only a 3.27 freshman GPA.

Based on studies like this, some colleges will limit the number of AP scores they consider when evaluating students’ course rigor. At these schools, taking additional APs beyond a certain threshold may still provide more college course credits, but won’t improve the strength of an application. The relative weight and importance of APs will vary across institutions.

AP Classes for Juniors: How Many Should You Take?

Junior year is widely considered the most scrutinized year of high school, given that classes in this later stage more closely approximate college-level work, and they comprise the final complete academic year for an admissions office to evaluate. Junior year is the right time to showcase your abilities, but not simply by maxing out the number of APs or advanced courses, but by thoughtfully selecting APs and courses to match your interests and strengths. Considering “fit to major” is especially important in the last two years of high school, as students have more choice regarding the academic pathways they pursue.

The number of AP courses that will be appropriate for a junior depends upon that student’s academic performance as a sophomore in similarly rigorous courses, the courses available in that high school and the bandwidth of the student. Some students have very time-intensive extracurriculars, which may factor into their admissions outcomes, and balancing academics and external activities will be essential.

Some students may be able to successfully manage three or four APs, but adding one more AP, especially in an area of relative weakness, may degrade their GPA as well as their happiness and overall well-being. Look to the past to inform these choices. Be strategic and thoughtful in selecting AP classes. Remember that academic rigor is only one piece of the admissions puzzle.

How Many APs Do Colleges Want?

Colleges will never publish a specific AP requirement or specify the exact amount of rigor they are seeking in a high school transcript. That is effectively impossible, as some high schools offer zero AP courses while others offer 30. It’s not reasonable to have identical expectations for all students, independent of the high schools they attend.

What a college admissions office looks for is evidence that a student challenged themselves within the context of their high school. Ben Kavanaugh, Associate Director of Admissions at Bucknell University, offers a useful benchmark: "If you have 6 APs, I'm not concerned about schedule strength." He adds, "It's okay to sleep and do a little less."

In some circumstances, colleges will publish specific data pertaining to the level of academic rigor of their incoming class to offer a sense of what “on profile” looks like. The University of Georgia annually releases its Early Action statistics, and in the most recent admissions cycle, the middle 50% of admitted students took between 10 and 15 AP, IB, or Dual Enrollment classes, indicating that a quarter of applicants had taken more than 15 advanced courses. This degree of institutional transparency is quite rare. Absent this level of granular detail regarding academic rigor, look to your own high school guidance counselors to provide insights. Many college counseling offices will have a general profile of students who were successful in their efforts to gain admission to particular selective colleges.

How Many AP Classes for Ivy League Schools?

There is no magic number of APs that will punch your lottery ticket to the Ivy League, and legion are the students who stacked their schedules and were denied admission to these hyper-selective institutions. The Ivies are notably cagey in terms of guiding students toward the degree of academic rigor they are seeking from their students, particularly as they are looking to recruit students from less advantaged backgrounds who may have far fewer opportunities to take AP courses in their schools.

A rule of thumb is that the Ivies are looking for students who took a rigorous course load in the context of their high school and were successful in their courses. That could equate to 5 APs from a school with a modest AP offering, 8-12 APs from a strong feeder school with a more robust offering, or zero APs from a school like Collegiate, Trinity, Sidwell Friends or Scarsdale HS, where APs are not part of the curriculum. Rigor is simply one piece of the puzzle for highly selective colleges.

Pros and Cons of AP Classes

AP courses provide a student a chance to stretch academically and explore more advanced, college-level content. Typically, AP teachers are among the strongest teachers in a school, able to handle college-level material and instruct the most academically advanced students. Taking AP classes provides a taste of college-level discourse, pacing and workload. Students who thrive in AP classes and achieve mastery of the course content are more likely to thrive in college. Succeeding in AP classes sends a strong signal to college admissions offices regarding one’s readiness for college-level work. And then there’s the benefit of earned college credit and what that can mean for a student’s college experience and finances.

The downsides of AP courses lie in their overuse. The AP arms race can lead to declines in sleep, well-being, and life balance. While rigor is generally good, there can be too much of a good thing. Additionally, some faculty feel hamstrung by the constraints of the standardized AP curriculum and prefer to explore specific content in greater depth, free from the AP syllabus and exam rubric. A good number of elite schools with pedigreed faculty have pushed back against APs in order to design their own advanced courses for their most advanced students.

Here’s a table to illustrate some of the Pros and Cons of AP courses

The Changing Landscape: AP Overload and Pushback

Although AP courses continue to spread like wildfire to more high schools and students each year, a small but highly visible cohort of high schools has come to question the value of the AP curriculum. A prominent group of seven Washington DC private schools collectively rejected the AP curriculum in 2018 and phased out all AP classes by 2022.

These schools, highly respected and nationally prominent, did not need the AP curriculum: their recent graduates have not suffered without it. Before making the announcement, these schools surveyed almost 150 college and university admissions offices to ensure that dropping the AP program would have no adverse effects on admission outcomes for their students. They learned that their students would pay no price in the admissions landscape; their matriculation lists wouldn’t change, and dropping the AP curriculum would give their teachers more freedom to innovate.

At these schools, the push to drop the AP curriculum came predominantly from within individual departments. The issue was not whether the AP curriculum was innately bad, but whether the AP curriculum was necessary at schools like Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day School, where a preponderance of teachers have advanced degrees in their fields of study and outstanding pedagogical skills. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to allow these teachers to design a more dynamic syllabus, one not circumscribed by the College Board, to reflect their own strengths and interests? There is an element of privilege afforded to schools with this level of teaching talent, one that does not easily translate to many of the nation’s 30,000 high schools, where most of the teachers do not have Master's degrees or PhDs in their fields of study.

The decision of these schools to drop the AP program also reflected a desire to take some of the pressure off their students and change the high-pressure culture. Students felt pressure to stand out from the crowd by taking increasingly challenging courses. But it’s not ideal for students to max out academic rigor at every level, even if they are capable of doing so. There are negative effects, such as mental strain and opportunity costs, when pursuing too much rigor. There is too much of a good thing.

It is noteworthy that while these schools do not offer AP classes, they continue to make AP exams readily available to their students. Schools like Sidwell Friends and Holton Arms will order and proctor these exams, acting as official AP exam testing sites. They acknowledge that their students continue to take and succeed on AP exams, as reflected by comments from Sidwell Friends History Department: “That doesn’t mean kids don’t take AP history exams; they do—with success.”

AP Classes as an Admissions Signal

With grade inflation running rampant in American schools, having a strong GPA consisting primarily of A’s is not nearly as special as it once was. When an A is essentially an average grade, we need some other way to differentiate students. Admissions officers at selective colleges and universities have shifted towards academic rigor as a means of making these distinctions. Many students have A’s, but not everyone has A’s in highly challenging courses. AP courses offer an efficient, standardized metric for rigor.

When high schools drop their AP/IB curriculum, they find ways to signal the relative rigor of their courses in their school profiles, such as by using an asterisk, bolding, italicizing, or highlighting their upper-level courses. Some schools assign distinctive titles to differentiate rigorous classes. The Urban School in San Francisco uses the Urban Advanced Studies (UAS) distinction. Georgetown Day dropped the APs and now uses its Upper Level (UL) class distinction. The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey highlights rigorous classes. Scarsdale High School in New York uses a college-like numbering system to distinguish the level of rigor across classes.

When admissions officers cannot count the number of APs or IBs, they end up counting how many 400 and 500-level classes a student is taking, or how many classes are bolded (or highlighted or marked with asterisks) to inform academic strength. Admissions officers need quantitative measures to avoid being overly subjective in their appraisal of a student’s academic strength.

If both GPA and AP rigor lose their signaling power, admissions officers turn to another tool: standardized testing. Many highly selective colleges are shifting back to pre-pandemic testing requirements for this reason.

How to Choose Which AP Classes to Take

Choosing the right mix of AP courses to highlight your strengths and interests is more important than maxing out the number of AP courses. Here are key factors to consider:

Match your interests and strengths. Taking AP courses in subjects you genuinely enjoy typically leads to stronger grades and higher exam scores.

Consider your college goals. If you're aiming for a STEM major, demonstrating strength in AP Calculus, AP Physics, or AP Chemistry may send the right signal to the admissions committee. If you're humanities-oriented, attaining success in AP English, AP History, or AP Language courses may align well with this academic narrative.

Know your school's context. Admissions officers evaluate rigor relative to what your school offers and the course-taking behaviors of students at your school. If you learn that the average student from your high school accepted by the state flagship took a total of 8 AP courses, and you want to be among the accepted students from your class, it may be prudent to align your course-taking with that of students who are typically accepted from your school.

Consider the strength of individual AP teachers. Some teachers have tremendous pedagogical gifts and can make any subject come alive. This is true in college as it is in high school. If there’s a superlative AP teacher at your high school who gets rave reviews, consider taking the class, even if it's a slight deviation from your interests. Some AP teachers can be life-changing and truly prepare you for college-level thinking and work.

Finding the Right Balance

While AP course taking signals academic readiness for college, and there are many reasons to pursue a rigorous course load, too much academic rigor can degrade GPA, squeeze out other activities, including sleep, and exacerbate stress and anxiety. Many students who push rigor too hard arrive at college exhausted. Many college admissions directors are acutely aware that students are arriving on campus with significant mental health struggles that developed in high school.

Daryl Jones, former Director of Admissions at Gettysburg College, would respond to the question "How many APs should I take?" with a telling answer: "How much sleep are you getting?" The goal is never to maximize AP courses, but rather to take a course load that demonstrates genuine academic strength, reflects your interests, prepares you for college, and still leaves room for the rest of your life.

Conclusion: Focus on Smart Rigor, Not Maximum Rigor

In a highly competitive admissions landscape, students will naturally seek out ways to differentiate their applications, and taking rigorous courses is one way to do so. But there is a point at which the pursuit of rigor becomes detrimental. The goal, then, is not maximum rigor, but smart rigor.

Students should choose AP courses aligned with their genuine interests and academic strengths. With the right level of challenge and rigor, students can maintain balance in high school and eventually arrive at college with their intellectual curiosity intact, well-rested, and ready to engage. Admissions officers certainly want those students on their campuses. And students who had a balanced high school experience are more likely to achieve balance in college and derive the most joy and satisfaction from their college years.