<p>I've noticed that some of the students who posted their high school schedules on this site are taking 6 credits per year, 24 credits. Is that how most schools are these days? It's way less than the usual courseload at my daughter's school. Do you think that colleges pay much attention to the number of credits?</p>
<p>Most schools have 7 or 8 periods, with 5-6 as a class being a norm. Selective colleges want 5 non-elective subjects and/or 5 honors/AP classes per year and there shouldn’t be a ‘free’ period (outside of lunch) or study hall during the junior and senior years, but other than that, 6 classes/day is very respectable.</p>
<p>It all depends on how the school or district issues credits. Some schools give a full credit for each semester, while others only give 1/2 credit per semester, and even more confusing are the schools on quarters or trimesters. </p>
<p>My daughter’s school is a combination of the above. We have semester long science courses worth 1 credit and other science courses that are year long, but still only worth 1 credit. The same is true for language arts type classes. All art electives are worth only .5 per semester. </p>
<p>In order to graduate, a student must have 24 credits with minimum requirements in each subject. Most graduate with 24-26 credits due to a forced study hall (nothing left for that period to take outside ceramics or theatrics) or taking college level courses off campus.</p>
<p>My kids had to take 8 credits per school year. They were required to have 28 credits to graduate. We live in a very large urban/suburban public school district.</p>
<p>As everyone has said, you can’t generalize across the incredibly broad range of schools in the US. What colleges will always do is compare the student to the opportunities available to him or her. Did she take the most rigorous courses she could handle? Did she pursue a foreign language through high school? Did she add extra courses in her areas of interest when she had space in her schedule? </p>
<p>None of my kids has ever had a study hall, and one gave up lunch last year to be in chorus. On the other hand, one D, a junior, is pursuing 3 foreign languages, taking AP French, AP Latin, Chinese III on top of a full load of core courses, either honors or AP – and her math and science grades are showing it! She doesn’t want to drop any languages but her GPA will suffer this year, I’m sure, so there’s a limit and students have to make those choices…</p>
<p>Agree you can’t compare districts. Ours changed a few years ago to require a lunch period - no exceptions. The maximum number of classes that can be taken is 7, if you have a lab science/phys ed it takes an extra period. My kids almost always had a math, science, English, history/social science, and foreign language each year, plus at least one elective. So 6 or 7 classes was a full schedule. My D who played 2 sports had a study hall some years, bur always had at least 6 classes.</p>
<p>Mine was 6-7 a year except senior year, with 21 required to graduate. Senior year you can take less than 6 if that’s all you need to graduate. Or you could just graduate after 3 if you wanted to (this option seemed to be very rarely taken). Obviously this implies that 1 credit meant 1 class for 1 full year. Semester classes were 1/2 credit. </p>
<p>Those that require 8 must have shorter classes. Our classes were 57 minutes and there was 8 minute passing time. With 8 classes that schedule would have you spending pretty close to 10 hours in school a day (so something like 7:40am-5:25pm). That might make sense at a private school, but not at a public school. I think class lengths might account for some of the difference in the number of credits required.</p>
<p>My kids’ school is on a trimester system. They only have five periods a day, half a credit per class per term. Long periods, so core classes are two terms long instead of three. Depth over breadth. </p>
<p>Oldest ds is taking four classes at the hs this year, and one class at the local LAC. </p>
<p>I had seven periods in hs back in the dark ages. 5 seems like nothing.</p>
<p>Those that require 8 must have shorter classes.>></p>
<p>IME, they are on a 4x4 system of some sort. At one school, my kids had A & B days, with 4 classes per day, and those lasted all year, At another, they had 4 classes one semester and another 4 the next semester. Classes were roughly 90 minutes long.</p>
<p>We have a similar schedule to cap. 90 minute classes on alternating days. We get 8 classes done in the year. It allowed for better science labs and more focused discussions in English and history.
In that environment most can fit academic classes and electives such as music or art classes. They also can do student internships for credit in lieu of study hall if a teacher is willing, so someone might get a credit for working for the drama department making sets, learning to run lights and calling advertisers, marketing, etc.</p>
<p>We had some crazy schedule that involved 8 1/2 periods I think, it might have been 7 1/2 plus a zero period that was mostly for the extra arts program though I think you could also take health or gym then if you had an awkward schedule. Both my kids ended up with some free periods senior year for one reason or another and got into selective colleges. They had 7-9 AP courses and older son was taking Linear Algebra, so they weren’t being slouches. The half period allowed more lunch periods.</p>
<p>To clarify, I was assuming 1 credit for core courses or full year electives that meet the same number of hours as core courses.</p>
<p>Yes, my daughter has a 80-some min alternating day classes. It’s about 3.6 hours of class per week, per class. Lab sciences get no extra class time. </p>
<p>I think every admissions presentation I’ve heard has stressed that they evaluate students’ academic programs on the basis of what was available to them. But I’m wondering, do they look at student A and student B, both with 4.5 weighted averages and the same test scores and consider them the same, even if student A earned 24 credits and student B earned 32? If student A has EC’s showing significantly more time and commitment, is student A clearly the better choice? Student A had much more time to do significant EC out of school because they only had to study for 6 classes and also were able to get maybe 120 hours of homework done during study halls at school… That’s a lot of time…Or would they expect student A to have significantly better EC’s and consider this in context of the academic expectations on both students? I don’t think I heard any admissions officer address this.</p>
<p>Or maybe student A covered US history in more depth than student B.</p>
<p>That’s certainly possible. But student B still had to cover the same fairly standard AP syllabus, was probably using/reading similar texts from the college board’s recommended list, and took the same AP exam.</p>
<p>There may be differences between schools, how could there not be? But when our school switched from a 7 credit 1 study hall system to an 8 credit system a few years back, neither the school administration nor any teachers said a word about lightening up individual course requirements. I’ve asked teachers about certain things I think they should be doing and gotten the response “we just don’t have time”. I’ve never been told, “yes, we used to do that, (or something else extra) back when the students had a study hall, but we dropped the course requirements since they have more classes now”. Fewer classes didn’t mean greater depth here.</p>
<p>@Vladenschlutte, as you may have surmised from posts here, more and more schools are turning to a Block system in which there are fewer but longer class periods each day. The many advantages are probably obvious to you if you did the crazy scurrying from class to class all day every day! </p>
<p>Our school has a 6 day rotation with 8 blocks (A-H) but only 4 80 minute blocks each day, plus a 45 minute ‘tutorial’ period at the same time every day, for school assemblies, class meetings, clubs, making up tests, talking to teachers etc. and a very civilized 20 minute ‘snack’ period at 9:45 for anyone who might have forgotten to eat breakfast before the school day started at 8:00. The other blocks rotate throughout the 6 days so your classes are at a different time each day until the cycle starts again (so if you are not a morning person you’re not handicapped by having AP Calc BC every day at 8 AM!). Plus you always have 2 days for homework. It works really well. Science classes get an extra block for labs or 2 extra blocks for some AP sciences. The schedule is almost impossible to memorize but it works really really well for learning and for kids feeling like students not sheep.</p>
<p>OP part of what adcoms mean by a ‘rigorous’ schedule is not just the difficulty of the classes but how full the student’s schedule is. So, I’m sure they recognize that all EC’s and accomplishments are more meaningful for a student who’s juggling more credits than the norm. </p>
<p>And re: your last post, what I worry about with education trends besides teaching to the test and the ludicrous core competencies that are terrorizing children now, is the idea that somehow more classes, longer school days, longer school years (all of which have happened just this year in our school) are going to somehow address the deeper and much more complex problems in US education. Because, you’re right, when these changes are implemented, before we even know if they work, no one seems to be looking at what is being lost in the process!</p>
<p>Regarding your last paragraph, our current 8 credit system is the accidental outcome of a failed cost-cutting attempt by our school board. In going from 7+1 to 4x4 (to save money, everyone but the school board hated it), the study hall was lost, and then when 4x4 was abandoned, we ended up with 8. Rotating schedules aren’t an option here. We have a lot of kids dual enrolled earning technical certifications offsite at cc so they can get a job after high school. Kids don’t need 32 credits though, the minimum is 26 for a college-bound diploma but the reality is that many of the best students are taking 32 (or more, with certain choices and a longer day you can get as many as 37). If you opt for only 28, you’d have to convince your GC and the colleges that was a challenge.</p>
<p>It’s possible that spending more class time gives a deeper education, but I think the luxury of longer classes too often means that the same material just expands to fill the available time. I know it’s true that these long classes try the attention span of even the best students. I think it’s no coincidence that our school has excruciatingly detailed rules about the number of times students are allowed to absent themselves from class to use the rest room. Some of them just can’t stand to sit through another interminable class without a break.</p>
<p>Really, the main drawback I see to the 8 credit system is that teachers say they don’t have time to assign major papers. But they didn’t under a 7 credit system either, so I don’t think it’s just a matter of credits. If the college board required major papers instead of just 5 paragraph essays I’m sure the time would quickly be found. I’m not in favor of stuffing more and more hours into the school year. I’d rather the hours they do have be well spent.</p>