<p>Hello, parents! I always get the best advice on this part of the forum because you parents have so much experience!</p>
<p>Before I begin, it might be helpful to know that I'm planning on graduating one year early.</p>
<p>I'm a freshman in high school and I'm currently taking Algebra 2 Honors. My friend and I are considering learning Pre-Calculus over the summer (at our school it's called flexing out and we get credit for the class) and then going straight into AP Calculus next year. We would be sophomores. We want to do this because from everyone we've talked to we've heard Pre-Calculus is a review of Algebra 2 except for a little bit more trigonometry and learning about polar coordinates. What are your thoughts on that?</p>
<p>Also, our school requires 3 English classes (taken your freshman, sophomore, and junior year of high school) and the last year you can take whatever you want because you need a total of 4 English credits to graduate. The English class for sophomores at our school is a joke. You only write about 1-2 essays and read about 1 novel. Everything else is short stories. I'm considering flexing out of that too and doing it over the summer. That way, since I'm trying to graduate early, I can fit AP English into my schedule (the prerequisites are the 3 English classes required by my school) rather than taking 2 semester electives. The English electives at our school are not taught well at all. Can you also give me your thoughts on that?</p>
<p>Overall, would it be okay to learn both of those classes over the summer or would it be too much? If I just do one of them, which one would you suggest I do over the summer?</p>
<p>You asked for advise… so I’ll give mine. Don’t be in a rush to finish high school early. Stay for senior year. It will give you more time to mature, and you can possibly stack up more AP credits for college. Good luck!</p>
<p>You are already two years ahead in math. Without doing summer courses, your math sequence will look like:</p>
<p>9th grade: Algebra 2 honors (now)
10th grade: Trigonometry and Precalculus
11th grade: Calculus BC
12th grade: (at a local college) Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations</p>
<p>Note that this would mean completing math up to college freshman and sophomore level math by the time you graduate from high school. This completes all of the required math for all majors other than math, although optional college junior and senior level math courses are recommended for statistics, economics, physics, and some computer science majors, and various majors do have their own math-heavy courses taken after the college freshman and sophomore level math.</p>
<p>So there is no real need to rush math from where you are now.</p>
<p>Unless you are going to exhaust your high school’s offerings in most subjects, it is not a great idea to graduate early.</p>
<p>In general (there are always exceptions) a student who has the smarts to graduate early also has the smarts to get into a high powered university. Your odds of getting in with only three years under your belt (and fewer summer activities of interest) are lower if you graduate early. Colleges acceptances (and personal growth) are not just about grades and scores. That said, I’ve known a handful of students for whom graduating early was absolutely the right thing to do. </p>
<p>I agree you don’t need to rush math since you are already way ahead of most students. OTOH, my older son, my math guy, thought that in our school pre-calc was pretty much a wasted year and said it could easily be done in a couple of months. It’s not uncommon for students in our school to take it in the summer and they go on to do very well in calculus.</p>
<p>I’ll add my voice to the chorus. Don’t rush through high school. Push yourself academically, but use the extra time to do more things other than take classes. It will make you a better, more mature person (and, as a not-unrelated benefit, a better candidate for elite colleges).</p>
<p>I could easily have graduated from high school early. In 9th grade, I had only one class at grade level (and the only reason for that was my school didn’t have ANY appropriate classes for me in that subject), I spent 10th grade in a program for 11th and 12th graders, and I got the top grade in a 300-level college course (at a state flagship, not community college) in 11th grade. Instead of graduating, I learned an entirely new language (in which I skipped three years), took classes that were out of my comfort zone (Music Theory, Ballet), wrote a play . . . I had a much better college experience for NOT being the youngest kid around, too.</p>
<p>My wife did graduate early from her fairly crappy rural high school. But instead of going straight to college, she took a gap year and worked as an aide in a residential school for autistic kids. It was an experience that affected what she did with the rest of her life significantly, and she was also glad not to start college at 16. She could have handled it fine, but she handled it much better for having broader experience before she got there.</p>
<p>It’s unusual for an early grad to be mature enough to handle college workload. (Actually, some of kids graduating on schedule would benefit from waiting too.) If you stay in hs, you can learn for free. Then you can either use AP credits at college and/or qualify for a top college. Also… lots of student hit their stride by senior year and start having the best times of hs.</p>
<p>I’m not a parent but in high school I had a lot of friends like you, really smart, ahead of everyone else and just wanting to get ahead. What they did was take cc classes over the summer to skip ahead in math and then during the school year after they ran out of high school courses. They also self studied ap classes just by getting cheap ap textbooks online and teaching themselves the material throughout the year. You may want to consider doing those things instead if you can</p>
<p>Note that many common AP courses are only equivalent to at most a semester of college course (calculus AB, statistics, European history, psychology, etc.), if they are even accepted at all (human geography, environmental science, world history, etc.). So being able to handle 5-6 AP courses at the same time in high school is usually not the equivalent of a true college course load.</p>
That’s not really a valid argument, since high school classes tend to assign more work while covering the same amount of material. (Take calculus. When you learn trig integration in high school, you might do 20 exercises on it. College classes might only assign 5 exercises from the same chapter.)</p>
<p>One reason I’m graduating early is because I’ll be finishing almost all of the AP classes my school offers by my junior year. I will have a couple left but it’s not a lot at all and I won’t need them for college.</p>
<p>It’s also usually a social issue. You will be younger than others in your freshman year class sometimes by as much as two years and that can be an issue, for example everyone wants to gather someplace and you are not old enough to participate. It becomes an issue later on as you perhaps move along to professional school where others in your class might be older… they are dealing with getting married and starting a family and buying homes… and you maybe are just into meeting people to date.</p>
<p>I think the emotional maturity piece is a big one. I was younger than the typical college student as well (due to my parents starting me in school early). Though I was happy (and getting all As), I always felt a bit out of sync with the others socially. Subtle, but I felt off balance. In retrospect, I realized it was because the others had a year or more of maturity on me. I would have been happier waiting until I was the same age as the other college freshmen.</p>
<p>I started college early and my son started college early and neither of us ever had or are having any academic or social problems. It all depends on the student. If you feel that you are ready and have completed all the requirements to get into the college in which you are interested, then I say go for it! You’ll have a whole new level and variety of classes to explore in college. And you will be exposed to a much broader segment of society than one typically finds in high school. I never regretted leaving high school early and so far neither has my son.</p>
<p>OP - Consider starting another thread, something like “Graduating early from HS - pros and cons?”. That would allow you to collect feedback from a variety or readers, including sucess stories like above.</p>
<p>My son graduated a year early due to an early-year grade skip. He took a gap year, because although he was certainly academically ready for college, neither he nor we felt he was emotionally and organizationally ready. I don’t see the need to spend more time in HS than is valuable, but do think that for most people, another year of growing up is valuable.</p>
<p>My daughter also graduated high school a year early due to an early-year grade skip. So, she had 4 years of high school, even though many courses were post AP.</p>
<p>She’s fine socially and academically in college and not the only “young” one, although she is the youngest in her class. (However, the college senior class has a student who turned 18 this fall, so she is far from the youngest student ever at her school. )</p>
<p>I honestly can’t thank you all enough for all of the feedback! I did create a post a while back about graduating early but I didn’t get much advice, so I’m glad that I’m getting a lot now. After thinking a while about skipping English and pre-calculus, I’m now thinking about just taking English and doing pre-calculus online over the summer instead of studying it independently. That way I’ll be sure I won’t miss anything. Most of my last year in high school I think I’ll do post-secondary instead of AP (except for a few AP classes) because a lot of the AP classes that are a year long only count for one semester in college or 2 semesters but I’m only required to have one of those semesters. Therefore, I think I’ll be wasting time. I’ll then graduate one year early. With the schedule I’ve created, I’ll only need to take one semester of general ed in college and I’ll be completely done with general ed because of the post-secondary I would do my last year in high school. Any thoughts on this?</p>
<p>Just be careful to keep your pre-hs-graduation college work dual-enrolled, and don’t graduate hs, take college classes, and then apply for college. If you do that, you may find yourself being a transfer student, which is harder.</p>
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