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150 hr rule in Texas...do other states have this?
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Replies to: 150 hr rule in Texas...do other states have this?
It is presumably an incentive for a Texas resident student to graduate from a Texas public university in the minimum possible number of credits for his/her degree (up to 3 extra credits allowed), to allow the state subsidy of the public universities to be stretched to cover as many students as possible (instead of a smaller number of students taking more credits worth of courses each).
http://www.collegeforalltexans.com/apps/financialaid/tofa2.cfm?ID=447
http://www.collegeforalltexans.com/index.cfm?objectid=C11E6975-F85E-C1C8-73B1AEEF1E771640
NM students at UTD would not be eligible anyway because you do indeed have to actually pay $1000 in tuition to get the rebate. dang! TANSTAAFL!
It really doesn't seem fair to count AP credits against the limit, especially when they specifically state that transfer credits do not count. They do not ask you what credits you want accepted.
I guess we are going to have to call the school about this. Her scholarship is full tuition for 8 semesters and this limit was never mentioned.
I agree that 180 is alot if you are not including AP and transfer hours.
My D actually has 41 AP hours plus 6 hours of transfer dual credit from high school which only leaves 133 available. All of her hours are actually contributing to her majors and minor. Looking back she probably would not do the minor again, but do we really expect that students should know going in exactly what they want to study?
These rules may eliminate the 6+ year undergrad but I don't see how they are going to necessarily increase the 4 and 5 year graduation rates. I think it would make much more sense to track rate of progress toward whatever degree/s the student is admitted to.
These policies do nothing about students who take more years because they retake classes several times to pass which seems to happen a lot in D's major at ASU. In that case, they may take more than 6 years to graduate (or worse not ever get a degree at all) but it isn't because they hit some credit limit.
It is, however, not very friendly to count credits from before high school graduation (AP, IB, college courses taken while in high school) toward such limits, since high school students usually are not specifically following the course plans for a major and other college degree requirements, so many of the transferred credits earned before high school graduation may end up being generic elective credits.
The main problem with that is that AP and IB credit, where allowed for subject credit and advanced placement, can only be applied to entry-level courses. So the student may not be as far ahead in progress toward graduation in terms of subject credit and placement as s/he may be in credit units. If the student's major has a long prerequisite sequence, then forcing him/her to graduate early due to the AP and IB credit may make scheduling more difficult than graduating on a normal schedule without any AP or IB credit.
Most UG degrees are less than 130 credit hours right? So with the distance between that and 150 hours a kid would have had to have taken more than 7 classes in HS for college credit that wouldn't count toward a degree. From where I am sitting, even though my kid has about every AP available to him, it would still be pretty hard for him to do.
If you conquer most of the APs, it seems like you will inevitably be covering the gen ed requirements at most schools. More typically you would end up with a few (two or three) extra social science courses than you need. Two or three though, not more than seven.
And for those majors with long sequences, 1. Many times, AP's can be applied to the beginning of those sequences.
2. Nobody's required to carry 18+ credits each term. Usually, 12 is enough to maintain fulltime status.
What majors at what schools?
One example I know of is physics at Berkeley, which requires about 41% of the total credits for the BA degree. The prerequisite sequence is 6 semesters long for the courses required for the major, but some elective physics courses require 7 semesters to get to them. AP credit can shave off at most one semester from the prerequisite sequence, so the minimum prerequisite sequence is 5 semesters for the required courses, or 6 semesters if the student wants to take some of the electives. In addition, the Berkeley College of Letters and Science does not accept AP credit to fulfill its "seven course breadth requirement".
Fortunately, for physics majors at Berkeley, the applicable credit unit ceiling does not come into affect unless one goes beyond 8 semesters, and it does not count AP or IB credit, or college credit earned before high school graduation against the credit unit ceiling.
Has your D checked with the school or an advisor to see if it means anything to her since she is there on a scholarship? Since she is in her senior year, it will mainly impact her final semester if she takes 18 this semester and has only 12 left over.