“Art” refers to fine/visual/performing art
Other than an art college or conservatory? No
Not requires but recommends 2 years is Cal Poly SLO.
Well I’ve always said that Cal Poly SLO’s recommendations are unreasonable. How many years do they think HS is given their many recommendations for 5 years of study in a subject?
“Five years of math” includes high school level courses (algebra 1 or higher) taken while in middle school. Basically, it means “take calculus if you can”.
In which case, they should say what they mean. And that still does not explain the 5 years on English. No wonder kids are stresses out when the college can’t effectively articulate
“Five years can be achieved by taking two eligible classes during one academic year or taking a college course.”
seems fairly well articulated to me.
“ Cal Poly will give consideration for course work taken in seventh and/or eighth grade.”
and
“ Cal Poly recommends applicants complete two years of advanced math courses such as trigonometry, pre-calculus, calculus or statistics for greater chances of admission.”
Is a fair bit more than just saying “five years”.
CPSLO should just publish an official MCA calculator and previous years’ thresholds by major.
An unofficial MCA calculator at https://mca.netlify.app/ suggests the following point values:
- Each semester of math beyond 6 (maximum 10): +125
- Each semester of lab science beyond 4 (maximum 8): +50
- Each semester of English beyond 8 (maximum 10): +50
- Each semester of foreign language beyond 4 (maximum 8): +25
- Each semester of art beyond 2 (maximum 4): +25
I get that 5 years of math might seem unreasonable on the face of it, but why would two years of art courses out of four years of high school be unreasonable? Seems to me you could easily do that without jeopardizing the usual “academic” course requirements at more selective colleges.
“I get that 5 years of math might seem unreasonable on the face of it, but why would two years of art courses out of four years of high school be unreasonable? Seems to me you could easily do that without jeopardizing the usual “academic” course requirements at more selective colleges.”
Arguably there are other subjects equally as valuable as fine arts but are not considered cores.
Adding one class sounds neato until you get into the details.
The issue I have is that the requirements are above and beyond any other college’s. Unless a HS routinely sends students to SLO, when would a student find out about such things? Certainly not early in the HS career. So senior year they are scrambling to double up on English and squeeze in an art class? At the expense of a course that Stanford may recommend?
The other issue I have is colleges that have requirements that are physically impossible to do given HS requirements. I could not have completed SLO’s. ( or Harvard’s) recommendations given my HS requirements for art, music, pe, religion without doing course overload or summer school, each of which has drawbacks. Other high schools have a computer science requirement and / or a classical plus modern language requirement. And if you have course conflicts, as is comon, the student now thinks they’re screwed.
But we are wayyyyy off topic
Not everyone aims at Stanford, though, and indeed that wasn’t the original question.
And plenty of kids at my daughter’s school did more than one year of an art and got into T20/T30/T50 schools. Her school did not have a religion requirement or music (in addition to an art) or classical language or the various other possibilities named above so yes, that’s also something to take into account, that plenty of schools do actually have a rigorous curriculum that still easily allows for more than one year of an art.
There have been some stories of some school districts where tracking (often for math) is decided in middle school or earlier, and it is hard to move up to a higher (e.g. honors) track later if one is not initially placed in it at the beginning.
Also, many high schools are focused on college prep, but the targeted or expected colleges are the local commuter-based less selective state university and the open admission community college.