Should Your Junior Choose AP Cybersecurity or Honors Spanish 3? What We Learned
It’s 8:17 on a Tuesday night in February, the course selection deadline is 11:59 pm, and my 16-year-old Sam is slouched across our kitchen table, Goldfish crumbs dusting the front of his hoodie, and our VHS course catalog—coffee stain from last week’s parent meeting blotted on the corner—splayed open next to my dying laptop. The line for 11th grade electives is still blank, except for two options checked and crossed out twice: AP Cybersecurity, the school’s newest STEM AP, and Honors Spanish 3.
“Mia says half the kids who took AP Cy last year got Bs or lower, and only half passed the exam,” Sam says, scrolling through the VHS class of 2025 Instagram page. “But Dad says if I’m applying to comp sci programs, I need every AP STEM I can get.”
Sam’s wanted to study comp sci since he built his first Discord bot for his gaming group two years ago, and he spent a week at a state tech camp last summer messing around with basic penetration testing. He’s also taken Spanish every year since 9th grade, and meets up with a casual conversation group at the public library every Saturday, because my side of the family is from Puerto Rico, and most of his cousins on that side only speak Spanish. Last Christmas, he sat next to his 11-year-old cousin Lila at dinner, and could barely get past “how are you” before he ran out of words. He came home that night and said he wanted to get good enough to actually talk to her, not just check a graduation requirement box.
Sam’s guidance counselor told us he’d already met the 2-year foreign language requirement for every public university in the state, so he could drop Spanish, take AP Cy, and fit Spanish in online during the summer if he really wanted it. My neighbor, whose son graduated last year, pulled me aside at the grocery store and said AP Cy at VHS is too new, the teacher’s still figuring out the curriculum, and it’s not worth the hit to your GPA when every junior year grade matters for college.
I went to the VHS PTA parent coffee a couple days later, grabbed a paper plate with one chocolate chip cookie that was already stale, and tracked down both teachers. Mr. Henderson, who teaches AP Cy, was honest. He said it’s a solid program, but it’s still new, he’s had to adjust the scope three times in two years, and there’s more reading and memorization than most kids expect—legal frameworks for data privacy, network protocol standards, not just hands-on hacking. Most nights, kids are looking at 2 to 3 hours of homework, on top of whatever other APs they’re taking. Ms. Lopez, who’s taught Honors Spanish 3 at VHS for 18 years, laughed when I told her our dilemma. She said Sam’s already one of the strongest conversationalists in her 10th grade class, and Honors 3 would focus almost half the semester on casual speaking and family vocabulary, exactly what he said he wanted. Homework rarely runs over an hour a night, and most kids who show up and do the work earn a B+ or higher.
That’s when I realized we’d been making this decision wrong this whole time. We weren’t asking what Sam actually needed, we were asking what looked best on a piece of paper. The first thing I tell other parents now when they ask about this same choice is, don’t just take the school’s word that a new AP is a great opportunity. Go ask for the actual numbers from the last two years: what’s the average GPA for that class at your school, what percentage of kids pass the AP exam. National numbers don’t matter—what matters is how it’s taught at your specific high school. That’s a 10 minute phone call to the guidance counselor, no extra work. The second thing is, have your kid map out what the workload actually means for their life. We sat down with Sam and did this: if he took AP Cy, he’d have three APs (AP Bio and AP Lang were already on his schedule) that averaged 2 hours of homework each a night. That meant no time for his personal coding projects on the side, no time for the Saturday Spanish conversation group, and he’d have to cut back on his part-time job walking dogs in the neighborhood that he actually likes. If he took Honors Spanish 3, homework ran 45 minutes to an hour a night, which left him time for all those things.
We ended up picking Honors Spanish 3, and Sam signed up for a free self-paced cybersecurity course through Coursera that’s run by a large state university. It doesn’t give him AP credit, but it also doesn’t affect his GPA, and he can work through the modules he cares about, skip the stuff he doesn’t find interesting right now.
It’s halfway through the semester now. Last weekend, Sam facetimed Lila, and they talked for 12 minutes straight about her new puppy and his gaming setup, no pausing to ask me what a word means. He just finished a module on firewalls in his online cybersecurity class last night, and stayed up 20 minutes late messing around with setting one up on our home network, just because he thought it was fun. We still don’t know if this was the “right” choice for college. Admission officers might see the transcript and note the missing AP STEM class, or they might see that he’s pursuing his interests outside of class and kept up a language for personal reasons. No one can tell you that for sure right now. What we do know is that Sam’s not stressed out every night, he’s still doing the things he cares about, and he actually learned something in both of his interests this semester, instead of just cramming for an exam he might not even pass. That feels like enough, for now.
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