Will Colleges See What Classes are Not Available to Me?

I received some pamphlets and brochures from several schools that I want to apply to, but many of them said that they usually consider a physics class a prerequisite for admission. My school has basically 0 funding and not a lot of teachers (I think our ratio of faculty-to-student is like 21:1) so we do not have physics, along with several other classes, such as AP Government, AP Statistics, AP Chem, AP Western Civ, etc. We also only have Spanish and German for language; I took German I and II, but then the class was cancelled, so I only have my 2 years of foreign language. I could not receive entry to a Spanish class.

The question is: will schools consider me less desirable because I don’t have access to many of the courses they look for in a strong candidate? Will they think, “Oh, she should’ve changed to a better school” (I can’t because of transport reasons) or think, “She should have looked for a course at her local college to take” (which would not have been financially plausible)? I don’t want to appear as a weak candidate because my school has poor funding and keeps cancelling classes.

No and no.

The GC will send a school profile, which will generally list courses available. If the course catalog is online, colleges can see that too. In terms of classes that were offered then cancelled, or classes that were offered but you could not get into, the GC should discuss it in his/her rec. This is not an uncommon situation.

@skieurope thanks!