College Confidential, I need your help! My stepson goes to a rural HS without good counseling. He is taking some courses at his local community college. My question is: when he takes a CC course, since one semester of CC generally equals one year of high school material (e.g. he is taking one semester of CC bio and it is the equivalent of one year of HS AP bio), do colleges see one semester of CC material as “worth” one year of HS material?
For example, if he takes 3.5 years of English, but .5 was taken at CC, has he fulfilled colleges’s recommendations to take 4 years of English during high school, or should he take an additional semester of CC English?
The best way to do this, if it is possible, is for the classes to be taken as dual enrollment in which the HS agrees to give HS credit for the classes. So he takes a semester of bio at the CC and the HS agrees to put 1 year of HS bio on his transcript. Then there is no question about whether he has satisfied the admission requirements and he may have transferable college credit to boot if the college accepts the units.
TBH, regardless of what a HS considers for graduation requirements or how a college equates college classes to HS classes, English really is, IMO, the one subject that every college-bound student should take every semester while in HS.
@skieurope I agree! But the choice he has is to take either Calculus or English, and he thinks he wants to go into computer science or engineering. So that makes it a tough call for us. There is no other flexibility in his schedule, unless he takes something during the summer, which he doesn’t want to do.