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It’s never too early to start thinking about planning your course schedule for next school year; the process of curating a perfect class lineup can be difficult, so it’s good to get a head start. Core classes are enough of a hassle on their own, but Radnor High School unfortunately offers such a diverse selection of electives that there’s no way to properly research them all. That’s where The Radish comes in.

In collaboration with U.S. News & World Report, we are proud to debut this extremely helpful, comprehensive ranking of RHS electives (that were offered in the 2025-26 school year) so you can easily make sense of the most prestigious, excellent courses this school has. Based on an ironclad methodology that our publication’s experts have painstakingly developed, this list should be the only thing you’ll need to build a perfect educational experience when the time comes to make your HAC requests. 

Methodology

We started by creating a raw list of all electives using last year’s RHS Elective Selection Guide. Then, we cut out the world language classes because we think they don’t really count as electives. (Stay tuned for The Radish’s 2026 Best Radnor High School World Language Classes Ranking.) With around a hundred courses remaining, we began to assign weighted values to various measures of elective greatness through the following time-tested system:

• Rigor (5%): Obviously, we’re taking classes for the primary purpose of advancing our academic careers. We’ve heard that Advanced Placement courses are the most rigorous, but we’re pretty sure that the “Honors” level is listed higher than “Advanced” on the RHS Student Handbook so there’s clearly something weird going on here. In lieu of prioritizing APs, we’ve instead chosen to give more weighting to classes with an (s) designation in the Program of Studies, as it signifies a summer work requirement and we believe making students think over the summer is evil. (That’s a good thing, because if you want to be a top student, you should be able to endure schoolwork in July.) [Class receiving most weighting: Band H]
• Funding/Endowment (10%): We were feeling too lazy to go and actually look at the RHS budgets or data on alumni contributions to the various electives, so we had to take a guess here. Classes like Personal Finance and Business Administration might sound well-funded, but chances are that an actual multi-millionaire would already have someone managing their money and would get little use out of taking them. We think that rich donors would probably be more interested in buying TVs because TVs are expensive, so we weighted classes accordingly. [Class receiving most weighting: Video Production and Broadcast Journalism II]
• Selectivity (15%): As we all know, the best electives are the ones that are the most difficult to get into. Scheduling conflicts can decrease students’ chances of getting the elective they want, but otherwise there aren’t enough roadblocks in the elective application process. Acceptance rates are not made public for electives, but we were still able to find some data for this metric. We compiled a list of classes that only run in even or odd school years and gave them a boost in the rankings. The best part of an elective’s exclusivity is that it keeps those pesky freshmen out, so we also developed a scale for rating grade level requirements that runs from “9-12” all the way to the elusive “11” or “12.” [Class receiving most weighting: Tie between Anatomy and Physiology A and FM College and Career Transition Prep]
• Importance of Subject (10%): A wise teacher once told us that math is the most important area of study, so we took their comment into account here. The elective selection guide only listed one class under the Math Department section, so we gave that one all of the weight and then decided the rest of the subjects were too irrelevant to waste our time determining their relative importance. [Class receiving most weighting: AP Computer Science]
• Reputation Among Faculty (8%): Because reaching out to all RHS staff would be infeasible, we again had to use our intuition here. Becoming an established elective takes time, so new classes likely haven’t had enough time to build loyal alumni networks. Without any data on how old each RHS elective is, we instead assigned less weighting to courses marked as being new in the Elective Selection Guide. This turned out to be a horrible decision, but nobody wanted to delay the publication of this ranking by coming up with a new way to measure faculty reputation. [Class receiving worst weighting: STEM Guitar] 🙁
• Reputation Among Radish Writers (2%): It wouldn’t be a proper objective elective ranking without some blatant bias on the part of the publication, so we introduced this measure to throw some intrigue into the list. We were limited to only judging the courses we’ve taken, but we were still able to do our part in swaying the rankings. [Class receiving most weighting: Intro to Engineering & Design H]
• IVY League (50%): There’s nothing better for your brain than sharpening the saw and actually going outside for once. The Radish is happy to endorse being physically active, so we would like our elective ranking to put a bit of extra emphasis on Health and PE electives. To accomplish this, we have given more weight to the newly-formed Intellectually Vigorous Youth League, a collection of eight classes with outstanding dedication to improving student wellness at Radnor High School. They also have amazing college and career placement, as research shows that star athletes are the demographic of students most likely to attend prestigious colleges after graduating RHS. [Class receiving most weighting: Tenth Grade Swimming]

Final Ranking

Because The Radish has experienced a recent shortage of bribery money from our typical corporate donor base, we were forced to forgo our advanced mathematical computing tools and manually add up values to create the following list:

*IVY League Courses

1. Tenth Grade Swimming*
2. P.E. Majors H*
3. Selective P.E. Weight Training*
4. Mindful Fitness*
5. Athletic Performance Training*
6. Team Sports*
7. Individual and Dual Sports*
8. Lifeguarding and CPR*
9. AP Art: Drawing
10. AP Art: 3D Design
11. AP Art: 2D Design
12. FM College and Career Transition Prep
13. Anatomy and Physiology A
14. Integrated Senior Seminar
15. AP Computer Science
16. Commercial Art
17. Silkscreen & Printmaking
18. Metals and Jewelry
19. Mixed Media
20. Adaptive Art Education
21. Sculpture
22. Drawing
23. Painting
24. Band H
25. Band and Orchestra H
26. Meistersingers and Orchestra H
27. AP Biology
28. Meistersingers and Band H
29. Video Production and Broadcast Journalism
30. Video Production and Broadcast Journalism II
31. AP European History
32. Art Studio H
33. Earth and Space Science A
34. Bioethics
35. AP Chemistry
36. Genetics
37. AP Environmental Science
38. Sociology A
39. AP Macroeconomics
40. Psychology A
41. AP US Government and Politics
42. AP Physics 1
43. AP Physics C
44. AP African American Studies
45. Journalism II H
46. AP Physics 2
47. Belonging Through Food H
48. AP Psychology
49. Intro to Engineering & Design H
50. Principles of Biomedical Science H
51. AP Music Theory
52. Art Studio II
53. AP Art History
54. Textile Arts and Fashion Design
55. Principles of Engineering H
56. Music Theatre Performance H
57. Aerospace Engineering H
58. Engineering & Architecture H
59. Principles of Photography
60. Independent Living
61. Film Analysis II H
62. Sports and Entertainment Management
63. Business Law and Marketing
64. Personal Finance
65. Integrated College Accounting H
66. Business Administration
67. Essentials of Cooking
68. Full Orchestra H
69. Art Studio I
70. Jazz Ensemble H
71. Intro to Ceramics
72. Select Choir H
73. Meistersingers H
74. Young Adult Literature
75. Acting H
76. Advanced Ceramics
77. Computer Graphics
78. Topics in Philosophy and Writing
79. Intro to Music Technology
80. Technical Theatre
81. Creative Writing I A
82. Journalism I A
83. Musical Theatre Performance
84. Textile Arts I
85. Film Analysis I A
86. Computer Science Essentials H
87. Academic Success Center
88. Behind the Scenes Workshop
89. Theatre Acting
90. Public Speaking
91. Practical Music Theory for the Modern Musician
92. Meistersingers, Band, and Orchestra H
93. Guitar I H
94. Women in Literature and Society
95. Guitar II H
96. Modern Band
97. Exploration in Tech Ed
98. Creative Writing II H
99. STEM Guitar

We recommend blindly selecting a bunch of items from the top few places of the ranking and ignoring all of the irrelevant classes beneath. If you’re in ninth grade, start thinking about how you can get into the most exclusive, prestigious elective in the school; all you need to do is fail your freshman swim test!