Choosing Next Year's Classes

The above is a slide from this year's UC conference showing the factors considered for admission to the UC system. As you can see, GPA and coursework are key. So how difficult a course load should a student take? I tell my students that they need to get eight hours of sleep a night, have time to have some fun, and not have knots in their stomaches. They should take the hardest classes they can and still maintain those perimeters. For some students, that will be no AP classes. Some will take one or two. Others can handle five APs and two honors classes in one semester. I find students have a fairly realistic idea of how much rigor they can handle as long as we give them the right to choose.