<p>My daughter will be a senior starting Wednesday. She wasn't able to fit the AP Statistics in that she requested so will have to take it at the community college. But, they don't call it AP there, naturally. She had to do the same thing when she signed up for Honors Pre-Calculus last year. Community college class. So, when colleges look at her transcript and check for AP and Honors classes, will these not count? I realize the credit is more than a h.s. class. But, it's the higher levels that she wants colleges to notice. After all, she did make an effort to take them in h.s. It's just that when the enrollment is down they can't offer as many classes. So, it's difficult to make up their schedules sometimes. She had to drop Physics in order to fit in Spanish 3. But she already has three years of Science/labs. She definitely wants to get a 4th year of math in, hence Statistics at the c.c.</p>
<p>Our school has the same scheduling problems. Our daughter is taking a CC course this year, but in past years, she has used online programs (in our family’s case, Virtual High School or Aventa Learning, which can be found online: both offer AP classes). </p>
<p>We advocated for the local education foundation to fund our school joining Virtual High School, which enables all students to take online courses for free, if they want or need a course that is not available to them at school, whether due to scheduling issues or because a small school has fewer courses to begin with. Many take them for enrichment, some also take AP’s.</p>
<p>We paid around $400 each for our daughter’s courses, because our school had not yet joined. Individual families can just contact the programs, and the parent can serve as the “mentor” required. Our school took all her credits, no problem, and even weighted the AP’s grades.</p>
<p>p.s. Our principal does not consider CC courses to be of the same level as AP’s. In the case of Freshman English (college composition) he won’t even give credit toward graduation for it, for hs senior year English 4.</p>
<p>I just read something on the UC ELC site that says if a class is on the ASSIST list at the community college (transferable), then it’s considered a UC honors course. Fortunately, the three courses she’s taken there are on that list. Two will be used for ELC eligibility.</p>
<p>As a bonus, you may find that your kids’ CC course may give your child college credit when s/he enters college. My D didn’t co-enroll in CC courses when she was in HS, but her CC courses did transfer and give her credit when she started at her private U as a transfer student. </p>
<p>Your D & her counselor can point out that the courses she is taking are CC courses because of a scheduling course that didn’t allow her to fit HS courses that she wanted in those slots. If anything, she should be getting extra “points” for her CC coursework, but ask the HS counselor (& perhaps the college admissions counselor at schools she’s particularly interested in).</p>
<p>In my son’s school - they have what is called “embedded” college courses. They do not offer AP. So my son took 5 of these embedded courses during his highschool career and he did very well. However, depending on the college your child gets accepted to will determine of the classes will transfer. My son is attending Northwestern and they DID NOT accept any of the college credit. His friend who is attending Lehigh - they accepted all of the classes for credit. AP is the way to go - most colleges will have a grid on their admissions site that states exactly what credit a child will get for a particular AP score. Normally the college credit transfer information is a little more buried and a little more confusing. Basically you need to investigate each college and how they would handle college credit.</p>
<p>The quality of CC courses can vary widely and I recommend asking the prospective professor questions on the amount of homework and relative difficulty of a course. I’ve seen CC courses that were much easier than what I’d expect from a university course to CC courses that are as good or even above average when compared to university courses.</p>
<p>Our son took a few NetMath courses from UIUC and these were very good. They don’t offer statistics but they do offer differential equations, linear algebra (two courses), probability theory and calculus 3. Their medium is Mathematica so the student has to learn that too. They have a new geometry course (college junior/senior level) that I’ll mention to our son:</p>
<ol>
<li>The Physical Origins of Greek Geometry.</li>
<li>Renaissance Perspective and 3-dimensional Drawing.</li>
<li>The Industrial Origins of Cartesian Geometry.</li>
<li>Klein’s Erlangen Program to Unify Geometry.</li>
<li>The Geometry in Computer Graphics.</li>
</ol>
<p>just be aware- that if your kid is even thinking about law school, all college level classes (including community college courses taken as a HS student) will be calculated into child’s lsac (law school admission council??) gpa and will be forwarded onto the law school. These community college transcripts must also be sent to LSAC even though your kid was still a HS student.<br>
It shouldn’t be too much of a concern, but your 16 year old should know that these grades will count towards law school admission. I have no clue how these grads are viewed for medical school or other graduate programs.
I just wanted to pass the info along as it is a little known fact. (until you start going through the law school admission process)</p>
<p>It counts in things like scholarship applications and certain internship applications too. Our son took courses at five or six institutions and putting together transcripts can be a bit of work.</p>
<p>There is no one-size fits all answer.</p>
<p>Harvard will not count courses taken at a college (even Harvard!) toward credit, but will count AP courses with scores of 5 on the exam for Advanced Standing. Many colleges work on the assumption that they know the contents and rigor of an AP curriculum and the value of AP scores, but they do not know the rigor and contents of a community college course and are therefore reluctant to give credit for such courses.
In CA, there is a more integrated approach, since students can transfer from CCs to UCs, so it stands to reason that cc courses should count for college credit.
The moral is to ask, ask, ask, and not make unwarranted assumptions about how individual colleges will view courses taken at local colleges, whether they are Podunk Community College or Harvard College.</p>
<p>In our state, all the state univeristies accept a large number of academic credits from the CC as transfer credit. S2 took 2 CC classes as a sr. both got him credit at his state u. I noticed on his transcript page on the univ. website, it said he was admitted as a dual enrollment student rather than a freshman admit.</p>
<p>I don’t think a college would disapprove of taking a CC class if the class was not doable for you at your h.s. To me it would show initiative, finding a way to get the class rather than just settling for taking a meaningless elective at the h.s.</p>
<p>My son took an upper level Physics and Calculus course at a Community College because his high school did not offer the AP classes. Stanford accepted these courses as general credit toward his degree. They could not be used to fill the requirements of a major and the grades were not averaged into his GPA. But still, it was 10 units (5 units each) toward graduation which was helpful. The ironic thing was that Stanford accepted the units toward graduation but his high school would not.</p>