Do you need honor classes every year to get into a good college?

So by good college I mean you are talking about selective schools who need to be a competitive applicant for. University of Kansas and University of Kentucky are both very good school and they have >90% admit rate. So selective doesn’t equal good just wanted to make sure you know this.

Also for 9th and 10th grade rigorous classes such as IB AP Honors are are recommended for selective school and the more selective it is the more recommended it is. For your question constant rigorous classes are not needed but a significant portion is.

Another frequent forum visited @crsgo said 2/3 of all available AP classes should be taken. If you are studying Spanish as a foriegn language no body expect you to take the French AP class for example. And if you are going into STEM AP Art and music are totally unnecessary. Also graduation requirements take priority over rigor and my school requires a gym class but there’s no gym AP class so it’s fine if you sacrifice some APs for graduation requirements you just need to challenge yourself. So as for taking all honors and AP junior and senior year that’s impressive but totally unnecessary I’d recommend upwards of 5 classes be Honors AP or IB using my 7 period schedule. In junior and senior year and try to have 3 Honors AP IB in your first 2 years and you should be in a very good spot rigor wise.

If your schools offers 7 AP classes and you took 5 you are in good shape but if your schools offers 20+ and you take 5 that makes it very very difficult to get into ultra selective schools like JHU and UCLA.

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Well, it depends. So yes it is important to take honors and APs, the more the better. That being said, another factor that’s very important is context. So let’s say you take double the amount of honors anyone else at your school takes. But you still only take a few. This will still look really good because you are challenging yourself more than others at your school.

For instance, at my school almost no one takes any honors or APs. They are open to anyone, but most choose not to. When I graduate I will have taken every honors and AP class at my school. Way more than anyone else. But that’s only about 2/3 of my classes. The rest are not offered in honors.

That brings me to my second point. If your school doesn’t offer many honors, then you won’t be expected to do more than that.

Finally, gpa is also crucial. So if you take only a few honors and APs but get all As, that will still look excellent. So, while the more the better, it won’t kill your chances if you don’t have a ton.