Honors and advanced placement (AP) courses are commonly viewed as more demanding than standard high school offerings. Schools employ a range of methods to account for such differences when calculating grade point average and the associated rank in class for graduating students. In turn, these statistics have a sizeable impact on college admission and access to financial aid. The authors establish the relationship between the grade earned and type of high school science course taken for 7,613 students by modeling their later performance in an introductory college course. The sample is drawn from more than 100 introductory science courses at 55 randomly chosen college and universities. Accounting for variations in college grading systems, strong evidence is found in favor of the practice of adding bonus points to students’ high school course grades in the sciences, namely, on a 4-point scale, 1 point for AP courses and .5 for honors courses.
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