Avoid AP Course Overload: It May Matter Less Than You Think

Why AP/IB classes may not be worth the added stress for you or your child

Venkates Swaminathan
6 min readMay 8, 2018
AP courses: how can you avoid overload?

If you’re a parent reading this, perhaps you’re someone who is professionally and personally successful. Perhaps you’re someone who has a college degree and values it in your life. So, to see how important AP courses have been to your success in life, here is a test. Can you answer any of these three questions derived from practice tests for the Advanced Placement (AP) tests? Be honest. Do them without checking the Internet or getting help.

QUIZ

1. (AP Calculus) Find the value of x where the function

has a local maximum.

2. (AP U.S. History) Based on this passage from historian Robyn Muncy’s book “Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935,” published in 1991, who did women working in settlement houses such as Hull House initially seek to help?

“As the early years at Hull House show, female participation in that area of reform grew out of a set of needs and values peculiar to middle-class women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Settlement workers did not set out to become reformers. They were rather women trying to fulfill existing social expectations for…

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Venkates Swaminathan

Venkates Swaminathan is the founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr (https://www.lifelaunchr.com), a virtual platform that provides expert college admissions coaching.