How many AP classes should you take for top colleges?

RReaders at Stanford and other selective colleges are each assigned a territory of high schools, and they learn how each school grades, which courses carry weight and how many the strongest applicants from that school usually take. That is why the question tenth graders ask us most, how many APs a top college wants, strikes readers as slightly beside the point.

Families feel the cost of a wrong answer in both directions. Some pile on courses until the grades crack, while others stop at a number a friend mentioned, without knowing how that number looks from inside their own school. A reader we learned from did offer a working rule from experience, and its limits matter as much as the number itself.