<p>If a high school student has taken English and wants to drop the English for the last term in senior year of high school. School has three terms in any given year. Kid will complete English class in two terms but want to drop the subject for the third term. Kid is keen to pursue research in economics and international relation. In order to make the room for senior year schedule, while completing the graduation requirements, only way to accommodate these courses is to drop English or drop one of the courses. </p>
<p>Kid wants to gain further knowledge into these subjects. The people who are teaching these courses are very accomplished people in these fields who have worked for US government or in business fields and have an excellent reputation in these fields even though they teaches in prep school. </p>
<p>I told my kid that it may not be good idea as I reminded him the following quote from a college website:</p>
<p>An ideal four-year preparatory program includes four years of English, with extensive practice in writing; four years of math; four years of science: biology, chemistry, physics, and an advanced course in one of these subjects; three years of history, including American and European history; and four years of one foreign language.</p>
<p>Will it be okay to drop English in last term? Should he talk to college? GC has told him that kid must have a convincing reason to drop English. Does anyone have suggestions? My kid thik that it is a solid reason to drop it? What do you guys think?</p>
<p>IMO
the time to specialize is in college or even grad school
in high school it is important to get as much of the basics as you can
What about taking an online class or even doing a special project with these teachers?</p>
<p>Ask the colleges your kid is applying to. They will give a straight answer. I would advise against it, but do what is best for you and your child.</p>
<p>College apps have probably already been sent by now. Most colleges admit provisionally with the assumption that the indicated senior schedule will be completed satisfactorily. If the schedule is changed, it’s possible that the college could reverse the admission. I recommend checking with the particular colleges to be certain or just sticking with the English for the last semester.</p>
<p>If that’s a prep school you are asking about, and the prep school staff agree it’s a good idea (because the other courses still involve research and writing), then it is probably okay to have just two terms of English instead of three in the last year. But I wouldn’t suggest that in most circumstances, as the other parents who have already replied have said.</p>
<p>I am horrified at the idea of anyone dropping English, ever, but I think some of the posts here are a bit alarmist. If the school is willing to graduate her, I can’t imagine that there would be a problem.</p>
<p>(My daughter - ahem - may or may not have failed to meet her graduation requirements. She arguably needed to take another year of math, although she had completed Calculus in 11th grade. But no one ever said anything to her about it, and she decided not to ask. In any event, she has her diploma and her college hasn’t tried to kick her out.)</p>
<p>If your child wants to compete athletically in college, he/she MUST take that last term of English (or risk not meeting NCAA qualification standards).</p>
newparent, are you saying that your child will complete his/her 4th year of English in those 2 terms,and that your concern is about the perceived difficulty of the curriculum if a primary academic subject is dropped for an elective? In that case, I can’t see that there’d be a problem, provided the 4th year of English is completed. If your child would graduate without the full 4 credits of English, I agree with those who suggest calling the schools. I know of kids who have called adcoms (well,whose parents have called them) to ask about dropping a math or science class that’s proving to be very difficult in senior year, and the schools have been surprisingly okay with it, as long as the basic requirements for math/science have already been met and the student isn’t a prospective math/science major.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen a college that didn’t require 4 years of high school english and we didn’t even look at very selective ones. Pennsylvania requires four years of English for graduation. I don’t think I would allow my child to chance not doing the final full year. As emeraldkity said, the time to specialize is in College, not High School.</p>
<p>I’d urge my child (okay, I’d insist) to take the full 4 years of English. It’s required for graduation in Colorado, and all of the schools that my daughter applied to last fall (most of them highly selective) required 4 years of English.</p>
<p>And no matter how “good” or worldly these high school instructors are, as Emeraldkity4 said, the time to “specialize” is in college, not high school. It’s essential that the student have a strong command of English, no matter what the college major.</p>
<p>These posts are hysterical! By the time the kid in question fails to take her last trimester of English, she will have already been accepted by one or more colleges. As long as her high school decides she has met the criteria for graduation and gives her a diploma, no college in the world is going to refuse to enroll her (after she has accepted admission and paid the deposit, etc.) because her transcript shows one English-less trimester. (I’m not talking about the NCAA, which I could imagine being independently fussy, because if memory serves that is not how newparent’s daughter rolls.)</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s worth checking with the high school, but hell would freeze over before a competitive private school would deny graduation to a good student because of a curriculum choice in which the school had acquiesced. That doesn’t happen.</p>
<p>I know everyone is well-meaning and all, but the advice on this thread has been sensationally bad. I am one of the biggest fans of literary studies that there is, but I would never make the argument that a marginal high school trimester of English – much less the last one – is indispensible to anyone’s education.</p>
<p>JHS, I absolutely disagree. While some of the posts have been overly alarmist, just because the HS will allow the student to graduate does NOT mean that a college will allow the student to matriculate. If a college requires “4 years” of English, then the acceptance will be conditional on meeting all of the admission requirements. The college might well consider the completion of 2 trimesters a full year of English – but neither you, nor I, nor anybody else on this board can guarantee it. This is the type of question that must be addressed to the college itself.</p>
<p>Show me a college that “requires” four years of English. Most of the colleges newparent’s daughter is applying to don’t even formally require high school graduation.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m wrong. But I have never, ever heard of a college refusing to matriculate an admitted student because someone looked at her HS transcript and determined that the curriculum in the second half of her senior year was not acceptable. I challenge you to find me someone whose job it is to vet that stuff. Someone will look at the grades, yes, but no one is counting the English or Math credits.</p>
<p>Interesting thread, rife with strong opinions. I really haven’t one, but let me throw this into the discussion: In D’s public HS, seniors can opt out of English 4 if their SAT verbal score is above a certain cutoff (I think it’s 680 or somewhere in there). The “catch,” though, is that they’re expected to dual-enroll in freshman comp through the local JC, which has a strong articulation agreement with UC. I think this might make sense for some students, though it annoys me that a public school system defers in yet one more way to College Board commercial interests.</p>