This part of my experience will vary widely for international students all over the world. I know for a fact that the academic calendar of the Philippines is completely different from U.S. schools, or schools in Korea, Singapore and China. Our school starts in June, with winter break taking place in December, resuming in January and ending in March.
Additionally, most local schools don’t offer AP classes. However, we do have our own versions of honors classes. Perhaps the best strategy to use now is to try to get into all the honors or accelerated clases there are at your school. In my experience, I was always in the ‘star’ classes for math and science.
Stanford does request information on how many years of Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Physics, English, and other subjects. This was kind of tricky, since English was offered all four years in my high school, and so was history.
Since I managed to take one year each of all the Sciences and Math required, I was able to meet all of Stanford’s basic academic requirements. Most of the Philippine schools don’t have any problem meeting these.
Now, since the entire class schedule is completely different for the Philippines and the U.S., it’s always the best and safest to turn in your most updated grades come application time (before December of your senior year at high school). I turned in my transcript for my second quarter of senior year and I really made sure to pull up my grades for junior and senior year to make my application stronger.
Here is the basic table of academic subjects required for Stanford admission:
To make it even easier, Stanford also ranks the importance of Academic and Non-academic performance for your application to Stanford.
