<p>JHS, I think AP Lang, is pretty much the equivalent of “Expository Writing” at Harvard. (one of my least favorite courses - though with an AP English credit (wasn’t divided into Lit and Lang in those days) - I actually took a history based Expos.</p>
<p>mathmom, as I understand it every “Expos” at least pretends to be about something substantive, not just learning how to write short papers. Right? What does AP Lang pretend to be about? Also, Harvard doesn’t give credit for any AP English courses, does it?</p>
<p>DS has been in Honors English for 3 years. They do a LOT of writing. Horrible essay assignments. They also write a lot for history and religion. And the American Lit course will have some as well.</p>
<p>I think I will have to discuss it more with him. </p>
<p>Personally, I don’t like to see students “ducking” the college composition courses. Writing is a very important skill in all majors, and more practice at the college level doesn’t hurt. DH is an engineering project manager, and his biggest complaint is that his subordinates can’t write for squat. He is constantly rewriting their work, and it’s not like HE’S Shakespeare. ;)</p>
<p>^It was not “ducking” for my D., as I have mentioned she did not learned anything in her Honors college English class, while learned a lot in her AP Eng. in HS. And, yes, I strongly agree that writing is extremely important and I strongly believe that D’s very good writing skills served her very well academically positively influencing her GPA as well as outside of academics. She is pre-med.</p>
<p>No Harvard never gave credit for AP English, you just got put in a more interesting themed Expos. A tiny number of people got to do creative writing instead of Expos. But my impression was that regular expos was pretty much about learning to write. (Don’t know what they are up to currently.)</p>
<p>While AP Lang’s emphasis is on writing - at least the way it’s taught at our school that doesn’t mean they aren’t reading. I actually thought the reading was more interesting than most of the school English courses since they didn’t just read fiction and write literary analysis. They read essays and speeches as well and learned about different formats of writing.</p>
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<p>Rhetoric. We read a lot of essays and speeches and other nonfiction works (and we wrote a lot, but if the class was about how to write I didn’t notice.) Some of it was lightweight, I admit, but not all of it by a long shot.</p>
<p>I don’t consider testing out of basic English composition an issue in my case either. I attended a rigorous high school with a strong writing program, and from what I saw my friends writing in the college class, I was far beyond that level. More practice like that would have been a waste of time. The only other writing I did in college was lab reports (and our senior labs were also graded by a teacher from the English department).</p>