Many high school students looking to get a head start on college-level courses can choose to take any of the College Board’s 40 Advanced Placement classes. But once Brown students arrive on College Hill, they may be in for a surprise: Brown only offers placement credit for 21 of these courses.
AP credits cannot be used to fulfill the 30 credits required to graduate with a Brown degree, according to the College’s website. Instead, students can use them to place into higher-level courses. But this placement credit is dependent on how students perform on the AP exams, and in some cases, they must also complete a high-level course at Brown to receive it.
In some cases, AP credit can be also used to satisfy concentration requirements or to petition for a semester of advanced standing, which enables them to graduate a semester early. Students who use AP credit to receive advanced standing must still fulfill the 30-credit requirement.
For some students like Omar Hernandez-Tena ’28, AP credits have been helpful in completing courses at Brown. Hernandez-Tena was able to use his credits to place into higher-level math and chemistry courses, which enabled him to explore his fields of interest.
Similar guidelines are in place for international diploma and certificate exam scores, such as those from the International Baccalaureate program, according to the College’s website.
IB credits “did help me get ahead of my degree,” Victoria Villalba ’25 wrote in an email to The Herald. After choosing to take IB courses in high school in part because “we were always told that colleges look at them favorably,” Villalba said was able to skip over a prerequisite class for MATH 0100: “Single Variable Calculus, Part II.”
Villalba, an economics concentrator at Brown, wasn’t able to take an IB economics course in high school. But if she had, she wrote that she “would’ve been much more upset” if she arrived at Brown and realized that the IB economics course did not count toward her concentration requirements.
While students cannot typically use AP or IB credits to meet graduation requirements, exceptions permitting the use of IB credits are granted in rare circumstances.
Individual academic departments ultimately decide if they will award placement credit to students based on their performance on AP and IB exams. Students can also place out of courses in computer science, biology, East Asian studies and more by taking placement tests offered by the departments before classes begin.
But other departments, such as the English and literary arts departments, do not offer any opportunities for students to bypass prerequisites. Instead, some of these departments provide numerous introductory pathways that allow students to strengthen their foundations in the subjects.
Although Jazlyn White ’25 is double-concentrating in English and literary arts, she took STEM-focused AP courses in high school to “make my academic transcript a little more impressive,” she said.
But she doesn’t think that taking humanities AP courses would have made “a large difference” in completing the concentrations, given that the AP English Literature and AP English Language exams are not accepted for placement credits.
But even when these advanced high school courses do not count for college credit, they still confer some benefits to Brown students. For Villalba, “IB credits really helped me in ways that don’t actually include the Brown curriculum or placement credits.” She noted that her transition to coursework at Brown was smooth due to the IB program’s rigor.
Bamlak Yilma ’27 didn’t get credit for the five AP courses she took in high school. But she took the biology and chemistry placement exams, which helped her skip some introductory courses that she says would have “held (her) back” in the pre-med chemistry sequence.
Because of the frequency that Brown offers general chemistry courses, students’ Medical College Admission Test timelines may be delayed, The Herald previously reported.
After placing out of BIOL 0200: “The Foundation of Living Systems,” Yilma “was able to take more biology courses that I was interested in,” she said.
Kate Rowberry is a senior staff writer at The Herald.
