<p>Small prep school, 300 kids from 7th-12th. </p>
<p>We don’t get to pick our classes. We take all honors courses 7th-9th. Our only elective is music, and that’s picking between orchestra, band, or choir. Sophomore year, you get two APs, and yet again, that large variety of music. 11th grade is mostly all APs, with the exception of pre-calculus and rhetoric. 12th grade, all APs besides philosophy. You can usually count on a group of upper-classmen bawling every single day. </p>
<p>I swear one year somebody is going to crack from all the stress/pressure/competition and go completely insane. However, I feel like it is worth it. We’re all trying to get away from this mediocre state and the crappy colleges it entails (lol @ asu).</p>
<p>We pick our courses on paper. Guidance counselors check last year’s grades and try to make as many people’s schedule work. If not, they tell you to meet them. You try to make your schedule work by seeing what teacher will let you take independent studies or you pick something else. Happened to me once and I had to take Latin III independently.</p>
<p>We get a form around March that we pick classes from. Kids show their teachers which classes they’d like to take the following year, and the teachers give their initials to mark approval. If they don’t approve, you can override the decision with your parent. </p>
<p>Scheduling is pretty random I think, they just make sure everything fits with a computer.</p>
<p>And as far as classes go… we don’t have a very broad range of choices. Freshman and Sophomore year you have honors/regular core classes, health/PE, a foreign language, and one extra stupid elective. Junior and Senior year there’s IB (and regular) classes, but not many different types of them (IB Math, English, Spanish, French, Music, Art, Business, Chemistry (SL), Physics (SL), Biology (HL), History (HL)… I think that’s it; maybe its better than other places, but still feels limited).</p>
<p>We got a form and have to fill out the classes we need.
Since I go to a fairly large school (2500-3000 students) and there have been insane amounts of budget cuts here in California, scheduling conflicts have been very common.
My schedule was completely screwed up for this year and I ended up getting like half the classes/teachers I actually wanted. I fought for them to fix it, but they could only fix so much. Ah. -_-</p>
<p>2700 kids or something, largest US catholic school, holla.</p>
<p>There are three assemblies for each grade level (9-11) in the second week back from school in January. Everyone gets a booklet of every course available the next year (Now the ‘course books’ are on our website). And then you go around going crazy getting approval for the classes you want. You need approval for all honors, AP, art, music, computer science, business, and some select limited/popular classes (Human Sex and Love, Yoga and TaiChi, Robotics, and other weird ones). A lot of classes have forms you need to fill out (most of the ones you need approval for) and for some you need to write paragraph answers to questions like why you want to take the class, your interests, etc. You submit your request to these special-case classes and a week later you’re told if you are accepted or not. Then at the end of January/beginning of February our school opens a link on the website where you go and sign up for your classes. A week later the school tells you if there is any problems.</p>
<p>It isn’t that interesting. Basically, the school scheduled 30 students for one class (which is literally 75% of the senior class.) Then the school didn’t have good scheduling, so a lot of people have to take independent studies, which has never been even offered at our school before. So you have kids who have four study halls, even though we’re required to maintain five academic classes per year (and we have seven classes a day). Then one class was a semester long class, but all of our classes are year-long classes, so they just dumped us into random independent studies this semester. And then some kids can’t drop down levels (like AP Cal to Honors Cal) because of the scheduling system, when they were told that they would be able to, as is school policy.</p>
<p>It all boils down to the fact that we only have 2 history teachers, 3 math teachers, 4 foreign language teachers, 3 science teachers, 3 English teachers, and two art teachers, yet they want to maintain classes at 5-15 students. It ain’t possible. We need more teachers. =/</p>
<p>Our 3000-kid school only has 6, so 4 is plenty for a school that (as far as I can tell) is much smaller. Then again, our classes are usually filled up to the max (36), with the exception of high-level AP classes.</p>
Private school. South Carolina. The local public schools are a different story. There are 9 high schools in my county, and one is the largest in the state with about 4000 students. They have a “freshman campus” and everything.</p>
<p>Yeah… Well we have basically one of each: French I, II, III, IV, AP; two Latin II, Latin III, one Latin IV, one Latin AP; two Spanish I, Spanish II, Spanish III, Spanish IV, Spanish A… It wouldn’t be a problem if we had 36 kids in a class. (Although there are only 5 in my AP French class… o.O), but we have between 2 and 18. The AP Latin class is two as is French IV. Spanish classes are never that small.</p>
<p>So when you only have four teachers and you have several classes with less than 5 students… it creates a problem. =/</p>
<p>My school has about 1,000 kids.
Our scheduling system is quite efficient.
First week in January applications for AP classes are due. You have to meet the prerequisites for these and be approved by the department chairperson.
Then, we will get these back this week. We will also receive a course selection worksheet that is specifically designed for you. It includes any classes that you must take (ex: English II for sophomores) and blanks that you fill out with anything from the course catalog
After the sheet is filled out, you have to return them to your guidance counselor.
Then, you register online for the courses you want. The teachers have a professional day for “leveling” when they decide what level classes to place you in (we have 4 levels of class in addition to AP).
Usually there aren’t many conflicts except for seniors (Freshmen and Sophomores pretty much have to take specific classes anyways)</p>