How DE classes are viewed by ad coms

Applying to College
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It’s difficult to generalize across all colleges and all situations, particularly with holistic admissions decisions. I was a half-time student at a nearby SUNY while an upperclassmen at HS. I believe this was a key factor for being admitted to Stanford, MIT, and Ivies with HS stats well below normal for admits (bottom few % of matriculating class by both HS GPA and CR SAT). Getting straight A’s in the many DE courses showed I was capable of succeeding at university courses, showed motivation to pursue a higher level courses than offered at my HS, showed HS teachers/GC encouraged unique path beyond what was available at the HS, and led to LORs from university professors that I expect were more highly regarded than typical. I don’t think more typical HS AP courses would offer the same benefit. Stanford gave me credit for the DE courses – both credit towards degree, and allowing me start at more advanced courses beyond other freshmen.

However, taking DE classes at an unknown community college or within HS may be treated differently. Cornell was mentioned in earlier posts. The website for one of the Cornell schools mentions this distinction saying Cornell may give credit for a “course taken on a college/university campus with matriculated degree students and taught by a college/university professor”, but will not give credit for “courses sponsored by colleges or universities but taught in the high school to high school students.”

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22

I asked this question to Michigan the last few year’s and they say they want the students to exhaust the Aps then take DE. This could mean lots of things depending on major. They don’t like students loading up on Des is there are still Aps that make sense to take.

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23

You get a transcript from the university, too. That is distinction. I agree it is much more like an AP than it is a DE at a CC or school where you sit in the room with undergrads.

But yes, all just paperwork.

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You are assuming (and may have been the case in your situation) that the DE is harder than APs or HS honors. I don’t think that is universally the case. I don’t think AP Lit is necessarily easier than “intro lit” at CC. Lots of kids out there seem to be doing DEs in things at what would be an honors/HS level.

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25

The post also mentioned the DEs were standard SUNY classes taken on campus with SUNY students/faculty, and “taking DE classes at an unknown community college or within HS may be treated differently.” I am not assuming that the SUNY classes were “harder” than APs or HS honors. I am assuming typical adcoms see a greater correlation with university success from having succeeded in university classes taken at a university than from having succeeded in AP/honors classes taken within my HS.

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Sometimes DE is an advantage depending on the major. My C25 decided to do DE Calc instead of AP Calc. They’re a social sciences major and the DE credit was awarded by a solid in state public 4 year university. As a result, all of the in-and out-of-state publics we applied to and most of the privates would take the transfer credit as having had a semester of Calculus. With AP, credit is of course dependent on the score and the receiving school. For C25, the DE credit was a sure thing that meant all the math required for their major is done with in advance of entering college. It was a no-brainer and worked out for us, but it would depend on your major and where you want to go to college.

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27

College professor here.

I wouldn’t say that DE (meaning here DE as an actual college course taught at a college by actual regular college faculty, that is then used to also satisfy HS graduation requirements) is harder than AP or IB. In fact, it may even be easier! I will, though, say that (that type of) DE is better for getting students ready for college.

Consider that even very well prepared students often have trouble adjusting to college, at least during their first few months. This is because college is qualitatively different from HS.

For starters, the calendar is different—not just the fact that there’s less time actually in the classroom for a course, thus requiring a student to do more of the work of learning on their own, but also the rhythm of assignments, and the weighting of assignments.

As a side effect of that, college classes move fast compared to HS classes. It’s easier to fall behind. That said, there is, I think, less work involved for a student in college classes—that’s one of the forgotten truths about higher education, which is that at some level college classes are easier. However, they’re easier if you keep up with them. If you don’t keep up, you’re toast.

College faculty also know that, unlike HS teachers teaching a college prep curriculum, our purpose isn’t to make students look good for their next phase of education. In fact, we are very aware that if we send a student who’s anything other than our best off to a graduate program, well, academia is a small community and it will reflect badly on us. This means that we have an incentive to—to some extent—gatekeep. It might ruin your chance at a good college for you to get a C in HS; similarly, it might ruin your chance at a good graduate program for you to get a C in college. However, where a HS teacher might be incentivized to bump that up to at least a B, the incentives for a college professor mean that an earned C is what you get issued.

And finally, though this isn’t universal, there is the simple fact that many college faculty aren’t as invested in each of their individual students. We care about our students, yes, but that manifests in the aggregate. If an individual student is having issues most of us certainly will try to help them get help, but if a student falls behind? That’s not on the teacher to accommodate.

If a student is successful in DE coursework, they’re much more ready to handle these non-academic differences than a student who was successful in AP or IB coursework.

(DE courses taught in high schools are an entirely different animal. I do wish we had a different name for them.)

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28

At our local school in NY DE courses are considered in between regular classes and AP classes in difficulty. They are taught by high school teachers trained and authorized by colleges. My son took one full-year Forensics course through Syracuse and two consecutive half-year calculus courses through LIU-CW Post. He thought the Forensics course was challenging (they dissected a pig) and the math course a natural progression from his pre-calculus. The colleges gave him transcripts. Stonehill gave him 4 credits for the Forensics, and asked for the official course syllabi before giving him 8 math credits.

The high school previously did not have any specific means of identifying these classes, but they are now changing their nomenclature to call all of the classes College… They generally do not offer AP and College courses in the same subject, so they serve as a way to provide extra honors courses for seniors or in non-core subjects.

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29

Note that some AP courses take a whole year to cover what the substituted-for college course covers in a semester. Examples:

  • AP statistics.
  • AP calculus AB.
  • AP CS (each one).
  • AP psychology.
  • AP environmental science.
  • AP human geography.
  • AP physics (each one is commonly a year in high school, versus a semester in college).
  • foreign language – usually 4-6 years in high school to get to AP level, while college may cover up to AP 3 level in second semester and AP 5 level in fourth semester.

To those who consider AP automatically more rigorous than college courses, would that apply even in cases like the above where the college courses cover more material in the same amount of time?

“College in the high school” versus “college courses at an actual college”?

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Depends on how the school structures the class. Some of these courses were one semester at my D’s HS. AP physics C was one semester of mechanical and one semester of E&M. Calc was one semester of AB and one semester of BC. APUSH went well beyond the test curriculum and went on to modern day politics. Etc…

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31

To the extent I have seen people discuss that, the basic issue becomes that there are different factors in rigor. Pace is certainly one of them, but so is course content, and then grading norms might be considered as well.

My sense is that if you did something like a Stats semester at a selective four-year university of the sort that would, say, satisfy a requirement for an Econ major (so not necessarily the Stats class a Math major would take, but not a “fun” stats course either), and you got an A, that probably would be seen as more rigorous than an A in AP Stats.

But not necessarily any sort of college and/or any sort of Stats class.

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32

The crucial issue for this particular bit isn’t the length of the course, it’s the relative pacing from session to session.

In the vast majority of cases, college courses have less time spent in class than parallel HS classes of any sort, requiring (a) different sorts of coverage in class and (b) more reliance on students’ learning outside of the classroom.

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