Do APs matter?

On almost every tour, someone asks how many APs the school offers, and everyone leans in for the number. It's an understandable instinct. The count looks like a scoreboard for rigor, one number that lets you compare a Catholic school, a public school, and an independent on the same scale.

An AP is a College Board course taught to a national syllabus, with an exam each May that can earn college credit. Because it means the same thing on every transcript in the country, it became the shorthand for academic seriousness.

Several of the Bay Area's most sought-after schools, though, offer no APs at all, on purpose. Urban, College Prep, Lick-Wilmerding, Bay, Branson, Marin Academy, Drew School, and Crystal Springs all run without them. In their place, these schools teach honors courses and seminars their own faculty designed, built for the depth a fixed national syllabus doesn't leave room for.

The worry, of course, is college, and it's misplaced. These schools are known quantities. Admissions offices have been reading their transcripts for decades and know what kind of student each one sends, so a missing AP column costs their applicants nothing. Every school on that list publishes where its graduates go, and the lists are full of the colleges families are anxious about. What registers on a transcript is whether a student took a demanding path through what their school actually offers, whatever the courses are called.

None of this makes APs empty. At the schools that offer them, they do real work. Notre Dame Belmont runs its AP lab sciences in double blocks so students get full college-length labs, and Lincoln, a public school with more than fifteen AP courses, caps students at three because it would rather they go deep than collect them. Even the AP schools are telling you the count isn't the point. A few schools use other credentials entirely, and those have their own deep end. Convent and Stuart Hall offer the IB Diploma alongside APs, and Lycée Français and International teach the IB and the French Bac.

So do APs matter? As a window into how a school thinks about advanced work, yes. As a scoreboard, barely. On a tour, skip the count and ask what the most demanding version of this school looks like, who gets access to it, and what happens when a student wants more. Those answers vary far more than the AP numbers do, and they open onto the question you actually came to answer, what this school believes high school is for. And if what's underneath the counting is really a status question, prestige is its own subject, and we've written about it.