To your second question: should you apply to more than ten? I think the FAFSA thing was answered above, so I’ll treat this as a separate question. It depends. In my world, no. But different families have different factors affecting them, such as financial aid, types of schools applied to, and strength of the student application. I told my kids to apply to 4, max of 5. Here was my thought process: Applying to (many) colleges can be expensive (unless you get application fee waivers) and time consuming (varies by college). Assuming the senior year course load is already rigorous, it’s wise to be realistic about piling on inefficient uses of time. It’s more efficient to research the colleges ahead of time and choose those you might actually wish to attend for applications. Applications are only the start. Many colleges have separate applications for additional programs, from honors to scholars to scholarships to international and more, each potentially requiring additional essays and nonstandard deadlines and sometimes additional LORs. It becomes a lot for a student to keep track of on top of schoolwork and activities and life! You can only attend one. It’s nice to have options to compare some offers, but if you have chosen wisely from the beginning, do you need 15? I had mine choose 1 school where they knew they’d be happy and they knew would be affordable given their likely fit with known scholarship offers. 2 schools they really liked, could probably get into, and might be able to afford if the offers and merit were right, and of course, a reach school to see what just might happen. Kid 2, late in application season, discovered a fifth school with a program that made him say, “I really want this!” So he added a fifth choice because it was a school he hadn’t had on his radar before but fit all of his criteria. i could see that calculus changing for other families— the greater the financial need, the greater the need to compare offers. College isn’t cheap! If you are applying to 8 Ivies, Best add a few safety schools to the mix. Some families just enjoy bragging rights with a pile of acceptances. For us, since my kids are fully in charge of their applications— no consultants, no managing from mom beyond advising and consultation— there’s an important calculus between having a few offers to compare, applying realistically from the outset, and not destroying the senior year by making the workload insane with red tape.

I always encourage students to consider AP Stats. It is a challenging, but very achievable AP credit. Business degrees may require both calculus and statistics, and statistics will potentially serve as the basis for several additional courses in the business track, such as business analysis. On the flip side, depending on the school, there are students who do well in AP Calc who then go to college and struggle, having placed higher in the calculus sequence. Because of this, for the less-enthusiastic math student, I think the better options are sometimes to either take AP Stats and take the exam, then spend a few weeks early in the summer doing a review of trig & pre-calc using ALEKS (bonus: many colleges use the ALEKS platform for math placement tests) or take AP calc without the exam (and without so much pressure) with the idea of setting a better foundation for succeeding at it in college. Some students take both, since Stats is as much about interpretation, understanding, and communication as it is about math (there is nothing beyond algebra 2 in AP stats, prep-wise). One strategy to help you decide would be to look at the colleges where they are likely to apply and look at their math requirements and courses. If they seem more stats heavy, take AP Stats. If they seem more calc-heavy, take AP Calc, with or without the exam. Or, ask them which class they think sounds more interesting! Calculus has a lot of applications in physics, biology, more advanced statistics, and economics, while stats has applications pretty much everywhere in life, from interpreting politics and advertising to understanding studies to business, economics, the sciences, and more. Stats is more of a "Will I use this in everyday life?" kind of class. So either course will be of some value to them eventually. Good luck! Jen AP Statistics/PA Homeschoolers History of Science Honors/PA Homeschoolers

Odd. I have plenty of kids in my AP stats class who already took and passed AP Calc BC who find AP Stats both challenging and interesting. The Math is mechanically pretty straightforward, but the applications and emphasis on interpretation add a lot of interest, and a different dimension than what they do in calc.

My kids did a mix of everything— self-study at home, university courses, online courses, and small group courses taught locally by very qualified people we were connected to (ie, university professors teaching on their own time), as well as doing stuff more structured with just me. They found value in all of it. I did give my kids a fair amount of say in their courses, within a certain framework. They were pretty happy to go along with most of my suggestions, but they did have some of their own ideas in the mix. My question to my kid would be: what is it that you don’t like about the online courses? If you are choosing higher quality high school courses, they should expect high school level courses to feel very different from earlier courses, and to likely accomplish a lot more. There are also a wide variety of instructional styles online— just as many as there are in person— and some instructors are really good at developing class interaction; others foster almost none, and many others fall somewhere in between. The reality of College courses, if you kiddo is college-bound, is that most college courses are a blend of live and online courses; many colleges use either Canvas or Blackboard or some other online LMS that delivers the syllabus, connection to the instructor, announcements, a place to turn in homework, and sometimes, to take quizzes or tests, and discussion boards to have out of class class participation and file sharing. In inclement weather, now some places are implementing online lectures instead of cancelling classes altogether. So I would say gaining some experience with online classes is a very good idea. It is definitely a major plus to never have to miss class due to illness or travel, and to be able to replay a part of a class where you missed something or wanted to take better notes, since you can pause and replay videos of past classes in many cases! But for some kids, there is just “something” about watching a screen that doesn’t feel real, and they need more than they can get by reading the book on their own, so they want that live component to be in-person, and that’s just how it is for them. That’s legitimate, too. Some kids need the other kids around them in person to grin at or chat with before class. That’s also legitimate. So I would start by finding out why he doesn’t want online classes, and then you can figure out if it’s something you need to figure into your plans, or something you need to work with him on (my kids ended up needing to do a few things they didn’t want to; they ended up making some very cogent arguments about other issues that made t heir way into the plans we made). There are so many ways to do high school “right.” There isn’t just one answer. Jen AP Statistics/PA Homeschoolers (traditional and asynchronous) Honors History of Science/PA Homeschoolers

I teach AP Stats for PA Homeschoolers— I would be happy to answer any specific questions!

I have pointed out to colleges that it would be a major violation for a homeschooler to get a GED, as the GED is to be taken by someone who has NOT graduated from high school, and homeschool grads are absolutely high school graduates under their respective state laws. It’s possible the rules have changed since then— I didn’t look them up recently. But it is frustrating when a college, of all places, wants our kids to take an utterly false credential that is worth less than the real one they have already earned.

If you decide she needs a 4th year of math, algebra 2, which she’s taking as a junior, meets the prerequisite for AP Statistics. Why stats? Every field you want to go into uses stats any more— both stem kids and liberal arts kids end up needing to take stats, and for kids who don’t need to go farther in math, it’s often a very useful math credit. Stats is also practical in everyday life— in the class I teach, I already have kids coming to the discussion boards and volunteering ways they are noticing stats happening around them, and how they are applying what they have learned to understand the world a little more clearly, from noticing a misleading infographic to hearing another teacher (incorrectly) telling them that because of the law of averages, it’s really weird they have no left-handed kids in their class (and my stats kid quickly calculated how likely it is to have no left-handed students given the class size and supposed prevalence in the population, and noted that it was NOT all that surprising). Why AP Stats? It’s a do-able AP class-which, with a good score, can mean college math credit— but more than that— AP Stats focuses as much on clear communication as it does on the mathematics. Students learn to articulate exactly what it is they are trying to achieve, how they are going to go about it, what conditions they need to check to see that their methods are relevant to the situation, and finally, what their results mean in the context of the situation. It’s a class that does take some time, but it’s a lot of fun, and most students feel afterward that it was worth the effort, because they never have to ask how it’s going to be relevant to them. It’s not a bad option to consider for her senior year. I’ll also be offering History of Science next year through PA Homeschoolers, though the course description hasn’t posted yet; it’s a fantastic option for a challenging non-lab science or elective history course. We’ll be looking at the development of the scientific method and at several strands of specific sciences in some detail, using both a spine (SWB’s History of Western Science) and additional resources (a bounty of primary sources, plus Alvarez’s “T. Rex and the Crater of Doom,” and Shubin’s “Some Assembly Required.” Sorry about the self-promotion, but I wouldn’t bother teaching these courses next year after my last kid has graduated from homeschooling if I didn’t think they were worthwhile! I could just head out and do more birdwatching instead— but I really do love to teach these two courses, so I’ll just keep on going with them!

I just laughed so hard at the science fair line. I WENT to a school that was populated by a large proportion of families whose parents worked for a local well-known large global research company. Every year we had a science fair (and an art fair and an… well, everything at the school was a dang competition). Every year some kid with a ridiculous setup of test tubes and UV lights and beakers and reagents that everybody knew their parent had swiped from the lab and set up for them would win the science fair. My parents were both teachers, not scientists, and my grandfather was a Bell Labs scientist who believed in kids doing their own work. I still vividly remember the year MY science fair project (we were required to participate) was— a counted cross stitch I designed and executed entirely on my own, comparing plant and animal cells, complete with labels stitched into the design. I was pulled off to the side and quizzed by THREE JUDGES because a parent (from the lab) had seen that I won “most creative,” and lodged an “official complaint” (I didn’t even know there was such a thing for a kid science fair!) that I had “clearly had help from my mother, who is known to be good with needle and thread.” Well duh, why do you think I’d been sewing and quilting and cross-stitching since I was big enough to hold a needle? Yes it was my own work. I had to work on convincing them for half an hour. And once again, the kid with all the beakers and professional lab equipment took him the first prize, with nobody questioning it (because my parents were not jerks). After that year, my parents made sure I was on an “educational field trip” every year during science fair week. The funniest bit? I grew up and became an actual scientist. Most of the kids with this whiz-bang fair setups went into finance.

Well, I recommend my course over at PA Homeschoolers, of course 😉 But if AP is just not your thing, or if it’s not in your budget, the textbook author I use writes an on-level (non-AP) textbook— look for “Statistics and. Probability with Applications for High School” by Starnes and Tabor.

As long as writing FRQ responses of up to a couple of short paragraphs is fine for her, she will be okay there (I teach AP stats). A lot of students end up a little surprised by how much writing we do— no essays, but it is more than they expected from a math class.

Don’t dismiss writing accommodations. These carry over for AP exams, too!

I inserted a footer in the transcript that says, “Midyear grade report” for this one, and I updated the date prepared/date signed fields. It seems to have been accepted everywhere.

DS1’s college is offering them on campus, as least. They held the first week of winter session online to give everyone time to settle in, stay a bit distant, and get tested, before opening things up for week 2 onward. I’m not sure how they will handle spring semester. Boosters are required by mid-January, as well, from anywhere you can get one— local pharmacy or the student health center.

I agree with stats (caveat: I teach AP stats, so I’m not exactly unbiased). Everybody interacts with statistics at some level, from the job market to being an informed consumer to being a critical consumer of media, advertising, and literature, to understanding what probabilities actually mean, and understanding, at at least an introductory level, what types of conclusions can and CANNOT be drawn from a survey or an experiment. Beyond meeting a graduation requirement or getting a leg up on a possible future attempt at college (many majors from STEM fields to the liberal arts require at least one stats course these days), spending a year on statistics means spending a year on a course that results in becoming a much more informed citizen in everyday life— it’s a math course where the student never needs to ask, “When will I ever need to use this?”

What are her current thoughts about post-high school plans? Does she have something she is interested in pursuing?

Per the College Board, there will be no late fee to register homeschoolers for an exam seat if they were unable to get a seat by November because schools were hesitant due to COVID.

A got his first acceptance tonight, with substantial merit from Goucher. 1 down, 4 to go, so we still have a long wait ahead of us, but it’s nice to have one in the bag. It’ll be interesting to see where they all shake out so he can decide in the end. One other college won’t notify until December, but did write to him and encourage him to start applying to their scholars program, which I take as a hopeful sign as well. Editing to add: and today he got his second acceptance, from UD (Delaware) and another college that won't notify until later wrote to him to tell him he should be applying for their semester abroad, so that's 2 yea's, another 2 hopefuls, and one that I know from past experience won't say a peep until April.

This sounds wonderful! I also use “T. Rex and the Crater of Doom” in my history of science class (I didn’t think that one up; it’s recommended in SWB’s History of Western Science, which we use as a spine).

Yes, AP exam questions are hand-written. The College Board is starting to investigate moving a couple of exams to typewritten entries, but only for a limited set of exams, and I don't know that they are doing it this year; one of the two AP English exams is slated to move to a typewritten format in the near future, and one or two other exams. The others are still planned to stay on paper and pencil. My advice is to start practicing now and practice throughout the year. But start slowly and build slowly-- pick part a of an FRQ and do it untimed, then the next week do an entire FRQ (Free-response question). Do a single one a couple of times a week for a month. Then add a second one and do two-a-day twice a week. If you build gradually, it will become easier to handle, and you can focus on the essentials along the way: are the questions being answered correctly and completely? Are all parts of the question being addressed? Does your student understand how to interpret key question words such as explain, identify, etc? Good luck!

Got them done on Monday. That was a long day, and I was so happy to be done with that process, so I could get back to teaching! Now back to the even longer process of waiting for results from the college applications . . . *sigh*. I don’t even want that to go too quickly this year, because too soon after it’s over, I’ll be an empty nester, and we are actually really enjoying this year.

It means I probably shouldn’t post late at night? 😄 I was, however, always told— fill out FAFSA even if you don’t qualify for anything, because a lot of schools won’t even consider for things like scholarships — even merit scholarships— unless that doc is on file. Obviously, this will be school specific, and not true everywhere. And a lot of people do apparently find out they qualify for more at the college level than they thought they would, even if they don’t get federal money.

I did not. I noted on the transcript that honors and AP courses were unweighted. Often the first thing a college does is re-calculate the GPA by their own standards (weighted or unweighted) anyway, so that they are making an apples-to-apples comparison between candidates, and your kid isn’t competing for class rank. So I don’t think it actually matters in the homeschool setting. But … I could be wrong.

Yep, many schools want to see FAFSA before they send an offer. Some include scholarship offers in the initial acceptance letter, and may use the FAFSA data in that calculation; some schools may not be “need-blind” in admissions, and some schools just want to see if you are serious enough about applying there to go to that much effort, because it increases their yield to make offers to students who are more likely to accept. There are a few colleges sending out offers super fast, but the earliest “wave” of rolling admissions offers often goes out around Halloween, if I recall correctly from my last round. It is not uncommon for other schools that don’t use rolling admissions, or for students who didn’t make the “first cut” but also didn’t land in the “no” pile to wait until spring to get notices though, so be prepared for a long wait. I can see that I am writing with an excess of shutter quotes, which tells me I need to stop posting and go to bed.

The one Arcadia linked is the correct model number!

I think this is the one I meant. Sorry about the wrong model number 😉 I should have double checked before hitting the final post button.