Can you decline dual enrollment credit?

mikemac
Mon, 21 Oct 2019 22:56:21 +0000

The answer depends on the college. At UCLA, for example, they say

AP examinations, IB examinations, and college courses taken prior to or after enrolling at UCLA may be duplicative. In these cases we will award credit for only one.
http://www.admission.ucla.edu/Prospect/APCreditEN.htm

And they don't say if there is a process to waive the credit for the one you've taken thru DE, which is what you are asking. For sure you can't do it by declining to send in the transcript; colleges require transcripts from every college prior attended.
Why not see you can roll your own hybrid? Is there is a teacher willing to sponsor a self-study class geared towards the AP test? With a son bright enough to apply to strong engineering schools like the ones you mentioned he should be able to do this mostly on his own, perhaps taking a class such as http://online.rice.edu/courses/ap-physics-1/ or https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/ap-physics-1 and then meeting with the sponsoring teacher for an hour every week. Maybe even less; a real college physics class is 3 hours listening to the guy drone on in front of the class plus office hours (that most frosh don’t go to anyway).

As a HS student I wouldn’t make a DE class my first choice. There is the disruption in the HS day of getting to another campus and back. And there’s the permanence. If you take a HS or even AP class it essentially disappears once you start college, nobody will ever ask about it again. But you need to list every college attended & supply transcripts when applying to grad school. A kid biting off more than they anticipated will have those grades pull down their college gpa.