VHS AP Cybersecurity vs Honors Spanish 3 for Junior Year: How We Helped Our Kid Choose
The course selection sheet was spread across our kitchen table at 9:47 PM last February, next to a half-eaten pepperoni pizza and a crumpled printout of my 16-year-old son Sam’s varsity soccer schedule. Sam was slouched in his chair, poking at a cold crust, circling and crossing out the same two lines over and over: AP Cybersecurity and Honors Spanish 3. As a junior, he’d already maxed out his core credits, and these were the two electives he couldn’t fit both of.
“Everyone keeps saying AP Cy will look sick for comp sci apps,” he said, not looking up. “But if I actually end up doing that Latinx studies minor I talked about with Abuela, I need Spanish 3 to get into 200-level classes in college. And Mia says the Cy teacher assigns six hours of homework a week.”
I’d scrolled through the 127-comment thread on the VHS PTA Facebook page about junior course selection the night before, so I knew the dominant hot take was “take the AP, it’s worth the extra GPA weight.” Sam’s been into coding since he built a schedule website for his soccer team in 8th grade, so it made total sense on paper. I almost parroted that hot take out loud, too, until he added that he’d already skipped two team dinners last semester to cram for AP Bio tests, and he didn’t want to miss the overnight away tournament next fall just to finish a lab.
I closed my mouth and pulled out a pen from the junk drawer by the fridge. Instead of arguing, I suggested three small things we could do that week to figure it out, no overthinking required. First, we’d email both teachers directly with two specific questions: how many hours of out-of-class time should a typical junior expect each week, and what’s the one thing you wish incoming students knew before signing up. Second, we’d ask one current student who’d taken each class this year what their actual experience was, not the hype. Third, we’d map out Sam’s existing weekly commitments hour by hour on the back of the grocery receipt sticking to the fridge, to see where extra homework could actually fit.
It took two days to get replies back. The AP Cybersecurity teacher wrote back same day: most kids who take this as juniors already have AP Comp Sci A under their belt, and expect 5 to 7 hours of homework a week, not including the midterm and final projects that add an extra 3 to 4 hours those weeks. If you don’t have prior AP Comp experience, plan to add another 2 hours a week of catching up on prerequisite material. The Honors Spanish 3 teacher wrote back a day later, and noted that Sam already had a stronger conversational base than most incoming students, since we’d mentioned he practices with his grandma every Sunday at dinner. She said homework averaged 2 to 3 hours a week, mostly vocabulary practice and short prep for group conversation days, and the only big assignment is a 10-minute presentation at the end of the semester.
We tracked down a senior on Sam’s soccer team who’d taken AP Cy that year after practice one day. He shrugged and said it was actually pretty interesting, but he didn’t play varsity, he had a free period first semester, and he still pulled a couple all-nighters to finish labs. “No way you’d fit that with soccer and all your other stuff,” he told Sam. “You’d burn out by October.”
We mapped out the schedule that night on that crumpled grocery receipt: 15 hours a week for soccer (practice plus games and travel), 3 hours a week for volunteering at the community tech clinic Sam started going to last year, 10 hours total for homework for his other three AP classes, 5 hours a week for driving practice and hanging out with friends, 56 hours a week for sleep. That left a maximum of 4 extra hours a week for a new elective. If AP Cy needed 7, something had to give. Sam wasn’t willing to cut back on volunteering, which he loves, or soccer, which he’s played since he was 8.
I used to think the goal of course selection was to load up on as many high-weight classes as possible to impress colleges. But our guidance counselor said something at the last parent night that stuck with me: colleges see your full schedule, and they know what’s offered at your high school. A B in an AP doesn’t help you more than an A in an honors class you actually care about, that leaves you time to do the things that actually show your interests. Sam already has concrete coding experience: he fixes old laptops for low-income families at his volunteer clinic, he built that soccer team website, he’s been messing around with a personal app to track team stats for fun. He doesn’t need an extra AP on his transcript to prove he likes comp sci. But if he dropped Spanish now, he’d have to retake it in college, which would waste time and money, and he actually likes practicing it with his grandma anyway.
Sam ended up putting Honors Spanish 3 on his schedule. It’s been almost a full semester now, and so far it’s working. He gets home from practice by 6, finishes his homework by 9 most nights, and he still has a couple hours on weekends to work on his stats app. He joined the school’s Spanish conversation club after school once a week, and he recently translated a handout for his tech clinic so Spanish-speaking families understand how to get help.
He’s still talking about taking AP Cy senior year, when soccer will be over for the first semester, and he’ll have one less core class to worry about. We don’t know if that’s the right long-term choice, and we don’t know if this decision will hurt his college apps next year. But what I’ve learned is that these choices don’t have to be forever. The best you can do is stop looking at what looks good on a forum or a college admissions blog, and start looking at what fits the kid sitting in front of you, with their messy schedule and their weird little interests that don’t check all the pre-written boxes. For right now, this works. We’ll adjust next year if we need to.
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