Honors and Advanced Placement Courses

The Bay School is committed to challenging our strongest students by offering focused, high-level courses in all disciplines. These courses promote rigor and discipline in mastering detail, cultivate depth of synthesis and analysis, demand authentic inquiry, and emphasize examination of the most salient problems faced by the world in the 21st century. Many of our upper-level courses have been approved as honors courses by the University of California, giving them the same weight as AP courses in the eyes of the UC/CSU system, and approval of additional honors-level courses is pending.

High school Advanced Placement (AP) programs are the subject of considerable and continuing debate at independent schools and colleges. The Bay School has elected not to offer a traditional AP-style program. We believe that our upper-level courses have tremendous integrity and value unto themselves; and thus our courses do not seek to take the place of any college freshman courses.

Even so, a number of motivated students each year prepare for, and take, AP exams in a wide range of subject areas. These students meet with their teachers during free blocks and commit themselves to additional study outside the normal school day. Our academic committee is continuing to watch and learn about the relative merits of AP programs.