Do outside classes help your college application?

AAdmissions readers measure a student's rigor against the courses the high school offers, which means a transcript can only show what that school had in its catalog. In the Stanford office we learned from, taking classes beyond school was described as the obvious move for a student who wants to show more, and it remains one of the easiest to make.

A student who has exhausted the catalog, or whose school offers few advanced options, can otherwise look capped by circumstance, and the reader has no way to see past the ceiling. The options run wider than most families expect, and some of the most useful look nothing like a math course.