Counselors Contradicting: Counselors should allow students to take hard classes without questioning them

I would like to argue that picking classes for the upcoming school year can be one of the most stressful weeks for all high schoolers. The pressure to pick the classes that you’re going to be stuck with for a whole nine months is not only overwhelming — but seems life changing in the moment.

There’s a large push to take AP and IB classes — especially for kids previously in honors classes. It’s a huge decision to take a higher level class for most students and the ones who ultimately choose to go the AP and IB route tend to take multiple different high level classes at once. 

But on the day students are supposed to turn in their course card to their counselor, kids wanting to take multiple AP, IB and honors classes are often met with pushback from their counselors about their choices. 

More often than not, counselors advise lower level classes for kids taking high level classes, saying there is a large workload or hard tests. This adds a new and unnecessary stress for kids who were sure of their decision before. 

In my personal experience, kids who choose to take AP and IB classes have usually weighed all of their options beforehand. They spend weeks talking to upperclassmen, parents and teachers about what the best course is for them and they understand the load they’re taking on. 

The last-minute doubt-filled conversation has caused more than a handful of students to back out on classes that could have been beneficial to them. I almost took Honors Pre Calculus this year but was talked out of it at the last minute. 

With this being said, I understand the desire the counselors have to keep kids in the classes they’re “on track” for. The process of switching kids to different classes must be stressful for counselors in the weeks leading up to the beginning of the school year and even through the first semester. 

They’ve without a doubt seen many kids pile on honors classes without thinking and then request to switch out of them midway through the year. But avoiding these accelerated classes for all kids isn’t the solution, and it’s better to give kids a chance to try something harder to prepare them for harder classes in college. 

If the issue of switching out of accelerated classes is so prevalent that counselors feel the need to push people away from them, schools should work to come up with ways for kids to be more informed on different classes before taking them. 

Let’s stop scaring students out of trying new things.