Dual Credit Courses
I stumbled upon this article from the New York Times today, via NCTE, and was a little surprised. I haven’t been teaching that long, but for as long as I have been teaching, there have been dual credit courses. Is it just in the Chicago suburbs that this isn’t touted as a brand-new thing?
I, personally, think dual credit courses are great for high schools. Students get the chance to be challenged beyond the high school curriculum and earn college credit for free. As far as the argument in the article that these courses are often useless because top-notch, Ivy League schools won’t take credit from community colleges and therefore these courses should not be offered, I say phooey! These courses aren’t replacing AP programs, just offering another option for students. And, hopefully, a student could take, say, an AP English course but a dual credit biology course, if science wasn’t his or her forte.
more –
And, as far as AP courses go, I took 5 during my senior year of high school, and I did not take one AP test. Why? Because I was told by my alma matter that none of my tests would have counted. They did not accept an AP test toward a major or minor requirement, so English was out, and all of my other AP courses were not really core classes (like Economics, Statistics, and European History – but they would have accepted Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, or Physics, none of which I took in high school). So, it didn’t really seem worth it to pay about $80 per test just to have the bragging rights of the score. Luckily, I had great, creative teachers who really made class exciting, and didn’t just teach to the test, so I found myself incredibly prepared for college, whether I had the extra courses or not.
I didn’t take any of those “core” AP courses because I didn’t think I would ever learn the information well enough to take the AP test. I wasn’t strong in math and science, so I didn’t feel as if studying my butt off all year in courses I didn’t enjoy for maybe a good score on the test was really worth it. But, had it been offered to me, I might have taken my school up on some dual credit courses of this nature because the learning wouldn’t have been so test-based.
But enough about me! How do you feel about AP versus dual credit courses? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
The state of Washington has a program called Running Start that allows high school students to attend courses at the community colleges during their final two years without paying tuition. I went through this program to complete an AAS degree at the same time as my high school diploma, which saved me quite a lot of money so I was able to get through my undergraduate education without taking out loans.
It also meant that in more discussion-based classes such as literature courses, I was exposed to a much broader set of perspectives than would have been possible in a course held in my high school.
That sounds very beneficial. Did you attend the courses at the community college campus, or did the professors come to you? Was there anyone at your school who didn’t think those courses should be offered to high school students?