<p>A comment in another thread spawned this question.</p>
<p>Is there a class in your child's high school that isn't honors (honors points, etc) that in your/your students opinion SHOULD be Honors credit???</p>
<p>In my kids school it is Senior Composition. Lots of writing, a senior project, requires much work output. The payoff for both of my kids so far is hugely significant in shaping how they write and put together a presentation. My D who is now a college sophomore swears that is the one class that prepared her most for college. </p>
<p>The school will not recognize it as an honors class. It is not required. Most seniors do not take it. Why? Often because 1) no honors points 2) too much work. So sad.</p>
<p>How about your school? Is there a class that SHOULD in your opinion qualify for honors credit based on the work?</p>
<p>IB Visual Arts! I don’t think that it’s counted as an “honors/AP/IB” in weighted GPA, but it should be. I’m in the HL program, and it’s not easy. It’s a lot of work, it should definitely be counted.</p>
<p>Latin I and II at my old high school definitely should have been. Spanish and French were Honors, but Latin, about 10x the work and difficulty, was not.</p>
<p>Don’t know of any CP (College Prep) classes that should be honors… but I know of some “honors” classes that should NOT be. I won’t name them though, for fear of offending someone. But both my kids have taken some of them as electives! Easy honors points in the GPA (ok, it only counts for class rank, because they’re not core subjects so the colleges don’t care).</p>
<p>There are a couple classes in my daughter’s school that I wish had an Honors option. Not for purposes of pumping up the GPA or because they are difficult classes as they are currently taught. New York State requires a semester course in Economics and a semester course in Participatory Government in order to graduate. These courses are normally taught senior year. Our school only offers the basic courses and it is open to all students, including many who really don’t want to be there and who are disruptive in class or refuse to participate in discusses. It came as quite a shock to my now college freshman when, after taking all Honors or AP courses for 3 years, she had to sit in a class comprised of 70% non-college bound kids. Sure it was a couple of easy As, but she would rather have taken a more challenging class with students who actually cared about the subject matter. Having an Honors-level class would be a good solution since our school is not enamored of the AP program (another problem altogether).</p>
<p>Latin 3. Spanish and French get honors, but because there’s only one Latin class offered it’s not honors. Latin 4 is only honors. It puts the Latin kids at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>I also think it’s dumb that there are no 9th grade level English and history courses that are honors.</p>
<p>I know I will get some disagreement here, but in our district, the amount of time that the Wind Ensemble puts in (practices, home practice, lessons, sectional rehearsals in evenings) deserves at least a little weight. It pays off when the ensemble scores the highest nationally in festival the past three times they have competed (for a tiny district quite an accomplishment) - but when the weight for the class is the same as General Music (aka ‘clapping for credit’) something is just not right…D could not take AP Latin because she wanted to keep her music, and is taking a hit in class rank…</p>
<p>S in school IB program which has only 60 full IB students of out more than 300 in his grade. Also his school is the only one has IB program among 4 cities. Student comes from all ove the 4 cities. School counselor is saying their ranking can only base on class of 60 student which is not fair? ZI consulted collge admin and they said they will consider this kind of situation BUT please put this info under addtional info field.
Taking harder courses with a bit lower GPA is better than good GPA with normal courses as they are looking at if you have challenged yourself enough</p>
<p>hudsonvalley, perhaps your school could do what ours does with the pesky economics/gov requirement. If you take AP Econ they do enough Gov to count, and if you do AP Gov they do enough Econ to count. It seems to work pretty well. I know my son wrote a paper about voting machines/systems for the Econ class.</p>
<p>Our public high school (approximately 350 seniors) offers an anatomy class for seniors, which is so popular that more than 2/3 of the class takes it. The school has the same software that is used by medical schools, and the top ten students are rewarded by getting to see open heart surgery. The exams include things like having to recognize a dozen bones of the body by touch only. Everyone signs up for it because it’s “cool,” including the 249 seniors who are declaring themselves as premed (ha ha). They don’t realize how tough the class is, however, and many of them are shocked when they discover it’s graded on a curve…for many of them, their first grading experience with a curve. My kid pulled out an A after devoting nearly every free moment of his entire senior year to studying anatomy, and missed being one of the 10 kids to see heart surgery by 1 point…a heartbreaking but good lesson for college in the importance of that 1 point. </p>
<p>Interestingly, Seniors don’t warn the Juniors about grading in this class (although even if they did warn them, each kid thinks he or she can handle the curve anyway LOL). It’s not an honors class. Anatomy is almost a right of passage in our high school.</p>
<p>hudsonvalley - My D decided to take a dual enrollment course in Gov’t/Econ instead (no AP offered for these here either) and is spending enormous amounts of time on this as her teacher didn’t feel the CC demanded a tough enough curriculum. So, she gets the weight but now we’re finding that many of her colleges won’t grant credit for dual enrollment courses or CC credits!<br>
Our school has done away with many of the honors science sections above 10th grade. They do offer AP’s instead but, with block scheduling and one AP section, it’s difficult to work it out. They do give a smaller amount of weighting to Regents courses though.</p>
Why is this unfair? I would consider it unfair if the IB students were ranked with the rest who are not IB. Why should the regular students in the high school be penalized because the IBrs are in their school? That is what is happening when the IBrs are ranked with the regular students.</p>
<p>In my system, the IB students are ranked with the regular students in the citywide IB program, which is in only one of the city’s 12 high schools. That is not fair to the regular students.</p>
<p>When my daughter’s shool realized that they had many such classes they cancelled ALL weighting. For all classes including APs. I think t was not a bad idea.</p>
<p>Comparative Religions and Philosophy at my school should both be honors. They are two of the hardest classes, with the most homework, quizzes every day, and essay tests every two weeks. It’s also arguably the class where students learn the most, and the classes with the toughest professor (a VERY strict Christian Brother).</p>
<p>Not whole classes, but there are teachers at my school known to be harder then others that all teach the same class. For example, I had an extremely tough Chemistry teacher, the class was not honors, but I earned a B (the class had about 13 A’s out of 100+ students). On the other hand, there is another teacher that taught chem that was 100 times easier and almost all the students earned As. Unfortunatly, schools cannot assign honors teachers :(</p>