I go to a high school in MA, where the successive levels for courses are SP (standard prep), CP (college prep), AE (accelerated enriched), and Honors/AP (yes, they clump it into one level)
I have a TON of AE classes, which, because I go to one of the top high schools, are equivalent to honors if not higher in a normal high school. Can i safely classify AE classes as honors on the SSAR? there is no section for AE or accelerated. My counselor wasn’t sure but said to classify them as honors. Thoughts?
SSAR is a real pain in a certain sense, though it is convenient in certain ways too.
If it were my son (and I’m certainly no expert but he does have an SSAR since we are in Florida and certain Florida schools seem to be trending that direction) I think I would feel most comfortable putting those classes as “Honors”. I would not feel comfortable classifying them as “AP” since SSAR only gives you 3 options (not counting dual enrollment), and your AE is the 2nd highest option for your school, which would seem to correlate with “Honors” on SSAR. If you took an AP test for the class then I would put “AP.”
Gosh that sounded convoluted. Hopefully you caught my drift. Again, I am no expert. Probably the best bet would be to write FSU admissions and ask, but we are bumping up against the 10/15 priority deadline.
@SouthFloridaMom9 thanks so much! I think i’ll do that. without the honors credit my gpa is honestly not great… do you think there’s a risk of them rescinding my acceptance and/or rejecting me if they find out/ say i “lied” on the ssar?
@2collegehopes - I’m not qualified to answer that - the only meaningful answer comes directly from FSU. The point of SSAR is that you are self-reporting your transcript, but at some point - end of school year - your school will send your actual transcript and they need to match.
I’m just not sure how FSU will categorize those classes. Again, if it were my son’s SSAR I would be inclined to put the AE classes as “honors”, mainly because they are a step up from “Regular” college prep classes. Yet they don’t sound like AP or dual enrollment courses so they don’t fit those categories.
If I were you I would simply act in good faith, do the SSAR to the best of your ability, and then contact FSU for clarification. It would be best if you could contact them first, but if you’re bumping up against the deadline all you can do is the best estimate you can do at that point.
Clarification from FSU as early as possible is your best bet. You can update your SSAR if need be.
Last year it was listed by FSU that unless a class is labeled “Honors” that you don’t list it as Honors. This may have changed since last year (the SSAR was a huge pain to both applicants and FSU last year, and they still haven’t explained it very well, from what I’ve seen), so you will want to contact Admissions to ask, but that was the official word last year.
Ultimately, you won’t be the only one that accidentally miscategorizes classes that don’t fit into one of the SSAR categories. I wouldn’t worry about it too much but I would contact the admissions office for clarification, just to make sure you do fill out everything the “right” way.
It’s dumb, but the SSAR is going to take several years to be fleshed out. Eventually, I’m sure that FSU will add more than “AP/Honors/Dual Enrollment” as options for class levels. I believe that the ones that they list now are simply standard for the state of Florida’s public schools, which admittedly don’t have very many levels (there’s regular, AP, IB, Dual Enrollment, Honors, and Pre-IB)
I’m glad you chimed in @Pasbal! SSAR should be much more clear, with more variations for OOS and homeschool applicants.
We couldn’t figure out any way to denote that my son had FLVS (regular track) credits, vs. several subjects that he self-studied. This makes a difference at UF - they like to see validation of grades from accredited sources.
@jdschooled5 - yes, for the Florida universities that require SSAR (and I think there are only 3 FL schools that do this so far). At some point, though, (end of year?) an official transcript will need to be sent which is why it is so important that your SSAR match what you’ve done senior year exactly.
My son is a homeschooled student and dual enrolled, and we probably won’t have his spring classes finalized until early January. So we will need to update our SSAR if there are any changes.
