DE isn’t done here. There are UHS(University in the High School) classes you get college credit for by paying $100 but they are taught at school and there’s not many of them
Ok, I figured it was something like that. S did what they call 1818 here and if he does go to Mizzou, he will get four classss of credit for it. It’s already on his portal with the equivalents listed. That is a nice perk! A lot of the local homeschoolers do dual credit here. It was a huge deal to do the 1818 classes because St Louis U is over $35k/yr and his classes through there were only a few hundred dollars.
@Ballerina2016, I just looked online and saw that if I buy it used I cannot get the supercode that is needed to do work online. I imagine it will be the same way if we rented. Maybe what I should do is have S use a generic username and password and then when he is done he can sell it and the supercode will still work. We can sell it then for more than the bookstore will buy it back for.
@3scoutsmom, $1200!!! Yikes, at least it is a tax credit.
@texaspg – Your notes had me truly laughing out loud at work today. Showing my biases, I had you pegged as a white woman wearing pearl-buttoned cowboy shirts down there in Texas. Guess I had that one wrong.
Same thing for @mstomper. I also took the ‘ms’ as a ‘Ms’. Wrong again.
@kittymom1102 – Hmm, what’s wrong with this picture? A big piece of why your son wants to go to NEU is to be in Boston, and he’s never ever been to Boston? I know all the data isn’t in yet, and Vanderbilt and Northeastern are such different types of schools it’s like comparing apples and oranges, but I hope that he gives Vanderbilt a really close look before it’s all done. It’s a remarkable opportunity, from many standpoints.
@ChicagoSportsFn – Every kid we’ve known who’s gone to WUSTL has loved it, and those that are now in their 30’s (our oldest daughter is 37) have had a wonderful trajectory. My lifelong best friend died of pancreatic cancer last year, and his niece has adopted me as her uncle. She’s around 30, and is a WUSTL alumnus having majored in Chinese (white girl from L.A.). She’s now a free-lance journalist, filing most of her stories from Myanmar and Thailand. Has had pieces published in the WSJ and L.A. Times. She is a true intellectual, well-rounded, and credits WUSTL quite a bit for helping her learn how to think. Congrats again on your daughter’s ED admission there.
And I don’t care who that boy is – he’s not good enough.
One of S16’s hobbies is designing clothing, mainly swim clothing (given his proclivities). He’s designed swimsuits for himself and many of his teammates. One of his designs took third place in a national swimsuit design competition. My favorite is his Seinfeld suit with a photo of Kramer on each butt cheek, with “Giddyup” across the top. He designs all the gear for his high school swim team. Today he came home with this year’s sweatshirt. There’s a Bear Bryant quote (sorry @carolinamom2boys) across the back:
“It’s not the will to win that matters…everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.”
Given the work ethic of the kids on this thread I thought you all might like that.
Not too many kids at my school do DE. If anyone remembers a while back I brought up being told that colleges like 4 years of foreign language, so I figured I would have take it and then he won’t have to met the requirement in college, depending on where he goes.
On another note, do you all plan on having your kids take all the AP tests this year? I am planning on S take the AP tests that aren’t part of his planned major.
Son is planning to take the AP Lit test to get out of the final exam and AP Cal BC just because he likes math.
The school is paying for most of the AP test so there is nothing to lose by signing up. Depending on the school, he may out may not study hard.
DD will take Calculus BC (If she gets 5 she can get out of second semester of math at USC), Physics C E&M and Statistics.
At our HS students must take the AP test in order to get credit for the class. The AP test takes the place of the final
DS will take AP psychics 1&2, econ, gov, lit, and French. He did calc 2 last semester DE and is doing stats this semester DE so he won’t need those.
I am encouraging my DD to take the AP test for foreign language and maybe math (Calc BC), just as a nationally-normed placement exam, so she can be placed at the correct level in college. I am not sure she will. For foreign language she may take the SAT II or just wait and take a placement exam when she arrives on campus.
S will sign up to take AP tests…whether or not they help at his school of choice…sometimes when things change they may have helped…so better to have the scores available and waiting in the wings…
D14 did not take AP stats tests senior year because her college did not accept the credit…half way through her freshman year she changed colleges (within her university) and changed majors… and her Stats AP test would have helped her but she didn’t take it…
Hind sight is twenty twenty… S16 will probably take ALL AP tests, just in case…
My D took AP lit and got 6 cr for it, 3 cr for APUS, 6 cr for AP micro and macro, 4 cr for AP Calc AB.
5 tests scheduled-- 4 will fulfill a gen-ed or major requirement (though she’d likely forfeit 2 to retake the class no matter what her score as it is critical to her major); 1 will do nothing- but she’ll take it anyway. I think its helpful to the teachers to see how their students perform, and our school reimburses for scores of 3 and above.
@AsleepAtTheWheel My H went to school in Boston. So, S grew up hearing his stories about how exciting a city Boston is. H LOVED Boston with a passion. I think he loves its intellectual vitality. He went to Tufts but used to go to visit MIT and Harvard a lot for conferences and the likes. S feels that Boston will be as welcoming to him as it was to H.
The idea of Nashville is not something as exciting to him. The school? Sure! … The location? Not sure 
My DD will be taking AP Psych and Calculus. Her school pays for most of it and the parents only pay a small fee.
[For California residents thinking about the UCs]:
I have received so much from this community, so I want to share back. Maybe this will help at least one other student. This is NOT what any of us have looked at-- it is in the “Strange but true” category.
UC will give credit for AP and DE; however, the credits/courses DO NOT satisfy the breadth (aka “general ed”) requirements. So they are really of limited use, right? Disappointing.
Well, for IGETC (Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum), which is an articulated (contracted) agreement between the community colleges and the UCs in California, the community colleges DO ALLOW DE and AP credits to used for course credit. Completing IGETC, by definition, satisfies breadth, or general education, requirements.
Therefore, a highly achieving student can enroll in community college and quickly complete an AA degree and satisfy IGETC. My DC13 did this with 4 courses (i.e. 1 semester). If courses are correctly chosen, the second semester MAY make progress towards the major (or may not, as it is difficult to get anything upper-division in community college). Therefore, one could imagine transferring into a UC as a second-semester Junior WITH ALL breadth requirements satisfied a year after graduation from high school.
In our case, the plan is to stay for 3 years at UC with the hope of using some of the time to take grad courses and do research to burnish the grad-school applications; and of course to enjoy 3 years of the “undergrad college experience”.
As an added bonus, UC kicks you out once you have taken a certain number of units (as a public school, they need to have you educate and move on), but the calculation does not treat pre-UC credits the same way as those earned at UC, giving more leeway in how you construct your journey.
Think about it. Another bonus is that community college professors in California are excellent, and class sizes are small (unlike the UC Gen Ed cattle-call classes). An excellent way to experience education IMHO.
Highly overlooked by high-achieving students, but actually an incredible pathway! It is really worth investigating (for that narrow category comprising High-achieving students headed to UC).
But if a student had a (high amount) merit scholarship to UC, wouldn’t it be better to stay there all 4 years instead of transferring from CC after 1 year?
PROM QUESTION: so, I have become recently aware that the boys are supposed to ask the girls (and I guess vice versa?) in some grand way, to go to prom?!! Have any of you heard of this? For a kid who is kindof shy…how will they ever do this? Anyway…a little distraction…My S is already disappointed because the girl he was thinking he’d ask just told everyone about her new boyfriend…and it’s no my S… 
@Itsjustschool so are you saying that this should be done before graduation? In other words take these specific classes as a DE and make sure you have all the necessary classes. Since I have a homeschool S20 coming along this info helps tremendously. Or are you saying, do as many as you can DE and then fulfill the rest after graduation and then transfer in one year instead of 2?
@mommdc From what I can tell, transfer students seem to have scholarship opportunities at the UCs as well. I know for some of the schools they have regents for transfers as well as a number of other scholarships. For many private schools, merit as a freshman is important, but I think that the UCs consider transfers as potential scholarship recipients.
The UCs are also very generous with need based aid.