I definitely agree with ACT/SAT being the most important. My oldest DD graduated from public school in Texas, one year early, ranked number 6 in her graduating class of older students, with 40 credits earned from the local community college before graduation, and all AP/honors classes yet nearly all of her scholarships were based on her ACT score. We have started homeschooling since then but when I spoke to the people at OU where she is an electrical engineering major, they told us test scores are most important for scholarships and guaranteed admission.

My oldest daughter, who is now an electrical engineering major in college, graduated in 2011 from public school. She graduated a year early, and she received a Latin credit and an Algebra 1 credit in junior high. They are listed on her transcript at the top along with the school year and a (J) beside them. The legend at the bottom of her transcript shows (J) junior high. My son who also was in PS until the end of 8th grade has the same courses listed the same way on his PS transcript. How the school in my Texas town explained which classes were able to be counted as HS credit was to say that the teacher had to be certified to teach the subject in high school, students had to pass the course, and they also had to pass the EOC (TAKS at the time).

I'm glad I could help! Look into the Great Courses when they are on sale. That's what we settled on and they have been really great especially for literature! I have never found a program that has been very good for English either so I just make it all myself using textbooks, great courses, etc.

We tried Plato English for 9th grade at the beginning of the year, and it was extremely easy. I wouldn't recommend it. The work was minimal and not the least bit challenging.

6th Grade Hits: •Rosetta Stone Mandarin •Trail Guide to World Geography •Saxon Math 7/6 •Sadlier- Oxford Vocabulary Workshop •Word Within the Word stem lists •Kid Coder •Mark Kistler’s drawing tutorials •Junior Analytical Grammar Misses: •MyAccess Home Edition: Website is so slow to load and several times saved work is retrieved with additional characters added. Also when I tried to email customer service, I never got a reply until I sent them a message on their Facebook page. •Plato Language Arts (7th) – way too easy. High School Hits: •Rosetta Stone Mandarin •Trail Guide to US Geography •Saxon Algebra 1&2 •Teen Coder •Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop •Word Within the Word stem lists •Analytical Grammar •Auto Upkeep •LabPaq Chemistry Labs •The Great Courses- Foundations in Western Civ., US History, American Literature, History of World Literature, Homer’s Odyssey, Your Deceptive Mind, Argumentation, Classical Mythology, Dante, Herodotus, Astronomy Misses: •Learning Springs – Had several courses (most of them honors) from them, and when all was said and done, I ended up using them mainly as a guide for pacing. The assignments were not challenging or long enough IMO. I kept the textbooks they sent if they were good, and just ordered the teacher’s editions and workbooks from Amazon. I made my own lesson plans and assignments from them. •MyAccess College Writing – Same Issues as Home Edition •The Great Courses – Great Ideas of Philosophy (Content was good, but DS though it was too boring)

We are about an hour north of DFW :)

Thank you for all of this info! It is really helpful to have it broken down. I purchased level 6 from homeschoolbuyerscoop, and I wish I would have had this info then.

Thank you for your welcome! At the time we had the poor experience, I was in close communication with our academic counselor and the principal as my son was enrolled as a full time TTUISD student. They did attempt to stay on top of the English class issues, but I frequently got the excuse of it being a revamped course so it had "kinks" to work out. I can assure you that we waited well over 1-2 days for things to be graded, and I would have to email the counselor to get any action from the teacher. We had to point out several issues with the formatting of assignments where questions were formatted incorrectly, and the right answers were not a part of the multiple choice options presented. On one occasion, my son asked the teacher why he had missed a question and even sent her a page from the reading that showed the answer as being correct, and we had to email the advisor after he had not received an answer for a week. This prompted the teacher to send him a message saying that she was not in charge of the content and could not help and that we should contact the person in charge of curriculum. This message was forwarded to our counselor and the principal who assured us that it would be taken care of but it never was. Our experience with this class and the way it was handled led us to withdraw our son from TTUISD. Yes, their teachers are certified and employed by Lubbock ISD and do the Tech classes as a side job. This is one of the requirements to keep the program accredited. I'm not saying this is always the case with their classes, but it was our personal experience.

My son took several courses last year from TTUISD, and we were not satisfied with many of them. The worst class of all was English! It had just been revamped and the new teacher was awful! She was not only slow to reply to questions, but also rude and dismissive. :001_huh: