I see that Irasshai is a three-year program. Would the content be enough to be considered three years of high school foreign language, if the textbooks, workbooks, and video checksheets were all completed?

They are honoring the old price for me even though the email I had with the quote was from last August!

Following since I also was planning on the Edhesive AP course this fall. My son really liked the Intro course so I was hoping to stay with the same provider.

The Intro course uses Python, which some say is easier to learn before Java. But you should be able to find syllabi for both classes on the website--maybe you could show them to him and see which he'd rather do.

In the Intro to Computer Science class, at least, there is a student forum where they can post questions to an instructor or post their programs for an instructor to look over. They can also post their programs for the other students to see if they want.

My son is taking the Intro to CS class now and plans to take AP CS A this fall. He really likes the class. I thought they normally open each module as you go, but he joined halfway through and he says he thinks everything was open to him. Tests, quizzes, and most projects were automatically graded. They normally open registration in August. I think I did have to contact them to enroll as a homeschooler, but there was no problem. There were no teacher materials; everything is online.

The reason I am separating some of the DE courses is because a couple of the colleges to which DD plans to apply state clearly that they will not accept a course for transfer credit if it was counted toward high school graduation requirements.

Thanks, all of that gives me some good guidelines!

I haven't actually submitted a transcript yet, but my plan is to have a separate section on the transcript labeled "Concurrent enrollment--not used for high school credits" for college courses that aren't being used for high school requirements. I will include the grades on that list, but will not average them into the high school GPA. That way, I'm reporting all the classes, but making it clear which were counted for high school and which were not.

I'm planning to have dd use Larson Calculus (Early Transcendental Functions, 5th edition) along with Dana Mosely's free CalcView videos (for a later edition, but it looks like I can match up the topics easily) and also with CalcChat if she needs to ask a tutor questions about any exercises. Each chapter has 5-10 sections, and each section has a lot of exercises--often 90-some. Does anyone have recommendations on how many exercises to assign her for each section? I am thinking I would assign some of each "type" of problem, but even so, it looks like it would be a lot and I don't have a good sense of how many exercises would be "normal".

I'm sorry that I am not wording things well. All I meant was that different colleges might receive a different combination of recommendations, not that we would ask for recommendations that we wouldn't use.

Yes, I do understand that. I just meant that they would upload them to the Common App and we would decide which to send to which colleges. I know we won't be able to see them.

Thanks. It does look like three of the colleges want the recommendations to come from two different subject areas, so we'll probably have to ask one of last year's professors. She will also have at least one "other" recommender who can talk about other aspects of her life. We sat down and made a list of possible recommenders and will probably get letters from several so that we can make choices. I'm already rethinking my upcoming 9th grader's DE possibilities so that he will have recommenders from more than one subject area in junior year!

DD is planning to apply to some tippy-top colleges this fall (along with some good in-state public colleges). The top schools all require two teacher recommendations. The best recommenders she will have are a university professor in whose lab she is doing biological research, and one of his PhD students with whom she is collaborating on a project. DD's project and the PhD student's project are separate, and the two recommenders could write from different perspectives. They are the two "teachers" who know her best and have worked with her most closely. She did have the PhD student as a actual teacher for a biology lab she took as dual enrollment in 10th grade. But I was wondering if it would somehow raise a red flag to have both recommenders from the same lab, one of whom wasn't officially a "teacher" in that she has never taken an actual class from him. The other possibilities are not nearly as good. There are three professors she had for dual enrollment in 10th grade that were small/honors classes, but she has not had contact with them since. Her dual enrollment classes this year are large lecture classes and she has not gotten to know the professors. She has been to office hours a few times for one of them, but there were always many other students waiting to talk to him so she wasn't able to "chat". What do you all think?

I posted this on College Confidential, but thought I'd post here, too, since there was some recent discussion on another thread about Texas Tech's National Merit scholarhip. We did a National Merit visit at Texas Tech this week with my D and I wanted to share some of the info we learned about their National Merit Scholarship, which is super generous. The scholarship covers full Cost of Attendance (currently $25,776) for eight semesters. They take out tuition, fees, room, and board, and the rest is refunded to the student to use toward books, transportation, and personal expenses. If I've calculated correctly, the refund right now would be $5,620 for the year. The scholarship will increase along with any increase in the COA. If the student moves off campus (freshmen are required to live on campus), then they take out tuition and fees and the rest is refunded to the student to pay for their off-campus housing and food. If the student does study abroad during the summer, they will cover that expense in addition to the eight semesters of scholarship. The website says that a scholarship student must take 15 hours per semester, but what it doesn't say is that AP and dual credits can be applied each semester to bring the total to 15. So the student could take fewer classes each semester and then add in credits from high school as needed. A 3.5 GPA is required to keep the scholarship, but there is a one-semester grace period if GPA falls below that. If the GPA falls below 3.5 in any future semester, the scholarship will be lost, but nothing will need to be paid back. The National Merit coordinator said that so far they have not had anyone in danger of losing the scholarship except one boy who thought he didn't need to actually attend classes. We asked whether a student could apply remaining semesters of the scholarship toward graduate study if he/she took fewer than eight semesters to graduate. They said right now that is not possible, but they are working on making it possible as early as next year. The student would have to do their graduate study at the university, not, for example, at the nearby Health Science Center. Our National Merit visit was very well organized and we were treated like VIPs. Students drove us from one appointment to another, and also took us on a driving campus tour (we did walk through a few buildings such as the library and rec center). D had an appointment with a biology professor and the Dean of the Honors College, and we had lunch with a current student. All of the students who took us around were current National Merit scholarship recipients, so we got to ask them lots of questions. There are lots of opportunities for undergraduate research and when the Honors College Dean learned that D is already doing undergraduate research at the university where she is dual-enrolled, he offered to set up meetings for her with several professors during her first fall semester, so that she could jump right into a research lab her first spring semester. Undergraduate research can be done for credit or pay ($8.00/hr). The pay for undergraduate research is in addition to the scholarship. We also toured the new Honors dorm which just opened this year. It is "pod-style" (you'll have to look at the layouts on the website to understand what that means!). The majority of the rooms are double rooms, and eight rooms share a single-gender community bathroom. There is also a single bathroom in each pod that is gender neutral. Rooms have their own thermostats. My D did not particularly like the climate of Lubbock, but all in all, we were very impressed with the opportunities that Texas Tech has to offer. I should add that DD is a junior but since she should qualify for Semifinalist this fall, they still gave her the full National Merit treatment.

Aww, love it!

Yes, I thought it was good for admissions in general, even if not applying to UT.

A few years ago I asked this at a homeschool college fair and was told 14%. More recently, in a Kindle book published last year by a former UT admissions person, "Your Ticket to the Forty Acres," he says 12%. That's for non-auto admit Texas residents, not including OOS or international.

Sorry to return to the thread hijack, but for Jazzy and anyone else following the discussion of Texas automatic admission, I received the following information from the homeschool admissions counselor at UT Austin: "Thanks for reaching out to me, I’m happy to help. In regards to your question, no, it is not possible for a homeschool student to qualify for automatic admission. In order to qualify for automatic admission, you must attend a ranking institution with enough students to put a student within the top 7% (i.e., 1/15.) The assigned rank is just an estimated number based on a students test scores compared to the average scores of students who have applied in the past, and we are able to see that is not a true rank within our review process. I hope this helps answer your questions. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help!" TREVOR PARTNEY, Coordinator for Technology Communication Initiatives The University of Texas at Austin | Office of Admissions | 512-475-7499 | admissions.utexas.edu So it seems that while other Texas state schools such as Texas A&M, Texas Tech and UT Dallas have a way to allow homeschoolers to qualify for automatic admission, UT Austin does not allow it. Also, UT publishes the middle 50% test scores for their auto admits on their website, which I will post here anyway: Middle 50% SAT Score: 1160 – 1390 (out of 1600)Texas Students Automatically Admitted: 1140 – 1370 Texas Students Not Automatically Admitted: 1200 – 1410 Out-of-State Students: 1250 – 1440 International Students: 1190 – 1440 Middle 50% ACT Score: 26 – 33Texas Students Automatically Admitted: 25 – 32 Texas Students Not Automatically Admitted: 28 – 33 Out-of-State Students: 29 – 33 International Students: 27 – 32

The advantage of being in the top 25% at A&M is that the student can be admitted automatically if that rank is combined with the following test scores: New SAT:Total score of at least a 1360 with at least:620 Math; and 660 Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (EBRW) Old SAT:Composite score of at least 1300 (Math and Critical Reading) with at least:600 Math; and 600 Critical Reading ACT:Composite score of at least 30 with at least:27 Math; and 27 English

Ok, thanks, that's interesting that they would still say that.

I should clarify, just in case it matters, that the sinks are not actually in the bedrooms but in the hallway right outside the bedrooms. There are photos on the website if you want to see what I mean.

My dd loved that the dorms had private rooms for everyone--each suite has 3 bedrooms with your own sink, a shared living space, and separate shower and toilet that each lock. It looks like they have good opportunities for undergraduate research in biology, which would be important to her. She liked the food in the dining hall as well. Overall she had a positive impression of it. They are not big on sports but that's not something important to her.

Thanks for letting me know. It's true that the website says they adhere to the new law, even though in the past homeschoolers were always holistic review. So either this person didn't know about the law, or they aren't really following it!

It would be interesting to find out what UT Austin's average test scores are for their top 6% class rank auto admits, since they receive more auto admit applications that the other Texas publics.