High School Credit in Middle School

My son is the same way – he completed 9 high school credits before he was officially in high school, including Algebra I, Latin I, and Latin II.

He is going to be a Junior in the fall, and he is going to be dual-enrolled with an online college.

I have a transcript that shows the credits he earned before high school, but, like you, I don’t want it to look like a 5-year high school.

Would like to hear other opinions.

Yes, you can. If it’s high school level work, it counts.  My oldest, dd17, just graduated a year early with 28+ credits. Florida schools require 24.  It would have been silly to require another year.  She’s mature and knows where she’s headed so no need for another year.

My ds14 going into 9th will have 4-4.5 going in.

High school level work should count regardless but unless you need it don’t stress it.  Clear as mud, right?  Here’s what we’ve done-

150 hours of study = 1 credit hour (honors would be 180 hours)

I dropped or combined courses from transcripts in order to report to colleges/scholarships a more “normal” amount of coursework over high school. It doesn’t mean we didn’t do each course and love each course and make good marks in each course. But the world doesn’t need to know the nitty gritty details necessarily. My ego gets the best of me at transcript time because I want to SEE all that hard homeschooling work recorded for the world’s viewing pleasure! 🙂 Bad reason to go overboard.

For my purposes 9th grade English might really include – dictation, literature, composition, grammar, recitation – things we did as separate lessons. I just figured the grade cumulatively.

I usually do pick a genre for my literature lists every year so we were easily able to say X year was European Literature, X year was American Literature, etc.

With History, we will have way too much according to the state and a lot at the high school level so we will use what the state/universities are comfortable seeing – 1 credit for American History, 1 credit for World History and 1/2 credit for Civics 1/2 credit for Economics. (unless we are planning a History major, see below)

For Sciences, be more careful if you have a student heading in to those fields … they really should have had a rigorous course for it to count for high school science. If not, they will suffer at the college level or never make admittance into the college of science within their chosen university. If they aren’t science majors? Be less stringent maybe.

Another tip … use courses on transcripts that show preparation for the field of study that your student is heading in to (within reason and to meet any other requirements of course). Colleges within universities want to see everything your child has ever done relating to their area to make admittance determinations, but only need to see that standard requirements have been meet in other areas. Subject based transcripts do that better, but a lot of schools want a year by year so best to ask.

Just my wacky .02 thus far on our journey.

I put a section on my kids’ transcripts labeled, “High school courses completed in 8th grade as part of advanced program.”    I only put courses there that were clearly high school level, such as Physical Science and Algebra 1.   I never had anyone question this.