Five? Ten? Twenty?

The answer is… there is no threshold below which a student is out of the running and above which a student is a guaranteed admit.

There seems to be a growing trend of students self-studying for AP exams in order to rack up as many as possible. In fact, according to the College Board, 3,779 students in the graduating class of 2018 took more than 14 AP exams! I assume that the rationale at work here is that these students think that they are positioning themselves better for highly selective admission. The truth is, it can have just the opposite effect.

Last week, I was talking with the Dean of Admission at a very highly selective university. “Don’t send us your grinders,” she quipped. When I asked her to elaborate, she defined a “grinder” as the type of student that is all about the test score, the grade in the class, the total hours of community service, the athletic statistics, or the first place trophies. “We’ve done the research. They tend to be very good employees, but they don’t change the world.”

So what do you do if you are a grinder at your core? Some of us are — it’s how we motivate ourselves, how we judge our success. And that’s fine! But remember to take a step back from the frenzy and pursue the things that you really love, even if you aren’t going to get a quantifiable result. Read a book that’s not assigned for class, just because you think it would be fascinating. Write a song. Join a campaign. Find your creative side and celebrate it. Ask questions and search for answers. Think of your education as a human being as happening 24-hours a day, not just when you are in school.

Am I saying that taking AP classes and scoring well in them doesn’t matter? Absolutely not! Your academic record is the most important aspect of your application for admission. But every year, highly selective institutions reject tens of thousands of grinders with perfect GPAs and test scores… and sometimes twenty AP scores of a 5!