All of them have a pretty significant written component, though it may not be essays, per se. Free response.
And many cover two semesters/go the same pace as college: Calculus BC is often taught direct entry, so you teach the AB too; Biology, Chemistry, and US History are two semesters in college. Government, Psychology and the Economics courses are usually taught in a high school semester. Some schools teach both halves of Physics C in one year, and they rarely have a separate lab section.
Not to junior mod or anything, but I’ve started a thread
Thanks for explaining. So kids do part of their college work while still at school? And then what, skip those courses after they arrive?
I see. It’s wild to me that kids (or parents) are hiring people to help write their college applications.
Schools can award credit based on their own policy. Some give a lot. Some don’t give any or very little, but weigh the scores in admissions decisions (so, like, they expect most kids to already be at the “normal college sophomore level” in their own freshman level courses).
So, depending a LOT on where you live and what your state/high school offers, many college bound high school students in the U.S. are earning college credit. As Manda JO says, its up to the school to determine if they will accept the credit.
There are the AP coursework discussed. And yeah, APUSH covers a year of American History, but is only worth one college course when applied over - not the two you’d get for taking a full year of American History.
Additionally, some states/schools offer PSEO or Dual Enrollment. This is where a high school kid starts actually going to college - usually something close to home, and gets both college and high school credit for coursework.
My kid’s school also offered CIS - College in the Schools - my youngest took a college level Spanish course in high school and got both University of Minnesota and high school credit for the course.
Many of my kid’s peers entered the University of Minnesota as Sophomores or Juniors due to this…and it keeps the expenses down. But my kid chose a small private liberal arts college where only one semester of credit would apply - they got to choose which courses. Some colleges won’t allow credits gotten in high school to apply to your major, but they can fill distribution requirements. Others don’t take these credits at all.
Some high schools have an International Baccalaureate (IB) program - you get college credit through that as well, although I’m not clear how they work.
PSEO is Post Secondary Enrollment Option - its what Dual Enrollment is called in Minnesota and Hampshire used the term upthread.
My kid did all three options - AP coursework, dual enrollment, and college in the schools. My son did a CIS course. There are some other options as well - there are, for instance, language camps that have agreements to grant college credit for college level work in a language.
Sure. I also taught myself enough Calc 2 to get a 5 on the BC test by studying for 4 saturdays before the test. The vast majority of students aren’t capable of that (out of the 5 kids in my calc class selected for the independent study I was the only one who got higher than a 2). I also never had homework in college that took me longer than an hour per night even when I was taking 20+ credit hours but that certainly wasn’t what my peers saw.
I was a weird admissions case with a 1560 SAT and a 3.25 GPA that didn’t graduate in the top half of my high school class. The only reason I got into Brown or Georgia Tech was to play football.
I forgot to add the point that its not useful to talk about outliers in this conversation. That I also now see is moving to a different thread.
You sound like my kid - test well… but the MAJORITY of kids can’t get a 4 on an AP test to start with. If we are teaching to “most people can get a 4 or 5 on the test” we probably need to make the tests easier - not load up the homework.
I think that the practice does help most people. For AP Lit we were supposed to read a book and write an essay on it per week. I got bored with that and stopped reading and writing the essays (actually I accepted a football scholarship to a school that didn’t even offer english as a class) and still got my 4. I know a lot of other kids found that practice and correcting very helpful in learning to structure their writing.
Class time was all about how to structure your thoughts and homework was about applying that structure. We had ~4 hours per week of class time but to write about Frankenstein you’ve got to read it and that takes more than a couple of hours and then to think about it, structure, and write an essay is a couple more you’re easily looking at 4-6 more hours per week just from that one class.
Practice does help a lot of people, but it doesn’t ensure everyone is going to pass with a high enough score to get college credit on an AP test.
Any amount of homework is too damned much, and that goes double for summer vacation required reading (an appalling practice which was unheard of until quite recently). Once a kid is out of the confines of school, or an adult worker is off the clock, their life should be their own and free of the demands of teachers or bosses. Homework normalizes the idea that one’s time is not one’s own but belongs to those who hold power, which leads to employers having undue control over “their” workers’ off-duty lives.
I had required summer reading in High School, circa 1977. Faulkner, if I recall correctly, and Great Expectations.
Not that recently, definitely in the 1980s. And, it works well for English classes so they can hit the ground running. We usually had 2-3 assigned novels plus 2 of our choice. Certainly not anything that would ruin summer vacation.
Lol, good thing you weren’t around when I posted the following:
This might make sense for some kids, but not for the ones who are going to go on to college, or who are going to have jobs where they’re not “on the clock” but rather, have to manage their own time to complete whatever tasks need to be done in whatever time it takes to complete them (which includes a lot of the self-employed).
The argument has been around since I went to school in the 1970s, and almost always, the reason was the same: when confronted with the problem, every teacher responded, “You have plenty of time to do my homework. What other teachers give you isn’t my problem.” (What wasn’t said: “What can you do about it?”, usually also implying some sort of tenure or union support. What wasn’t said to the parents: “Do you want your child to get a D - not an F, so I don’t have to waste my time with summer school - in my class?”)
Remember that education is meant to be preparation for the adult work world, with their expectations; note that in animals *bears, lions, etc), “play” is part of survival training. Why do Asian students out-perform White students? Because their parents emphasize education more than video prowess
Since this was a reply to my post, are you saying that teen years shouldn’t be more than school, homework, and bed? Throwing in “video prowess” is a pretty extreme alternative which pretty much no one here is advocating for.
The only thing I’d add to the list is sports or other extracurriculars to get you into college. You get fun time as child but in high school its time to prepare I got a summer vacation for the last time after 7th grade and then I took another one between graduating from college and starting my first job.