high school girl doesn't get to be valedictorian

[PeppyGPhiB]

Originally Posted by PM_Mama00

How does one even graduate in 3 years from high school anyways? I'm confused on how one of my sisters graduated from college in 3. 5 is pretty much the norm now.

It would've been hard for me to graduate high school in three years, but I believe it's still the case at most private colleges for students to graduate in four. In fact, with so many high achievers now coming to college with tons of AP credits, some are graduating college in three.

Originally Posted by epchick

It actually it is not that difficult to graduate HS in 3 years. In my HS you only needed 24 credits to graduate. During middle school you can get HS credit for speech, keyboarding, Algebra 1, Spanish/French. Then in HS you can "test out" of Spanish/French, and I believe other classes (although i dont remember which ones), then there are classes that you could take in the summer.

We could get high school credit for one year of a foreign language when we took it in 8th grade, but we had to save the rest for high school, where most of us took an additional two or three years. Is that not common anymore? I would think that as college admissions have become more challenging, students would be taking more than one or two years of a foreign language. At my university, all students have to take a foreign language through a third year level; if you've taken three or four years of a language in high school, you can probably test out of a year or two in college, but if you haven't, there's no way you're passing out of that requirement.

[epchick]

Originally Posted by PeppyGPhiB

We could get high school credit for one year of a foreign language when we took it in 8th grade, but we had to save the rest for high school, where most of us took an additional two or three years. Is that not common anymore? I would think that as college admissions have become more challenging, students would be taking more than one or two years of a foreign language. At my university, all students have to take a foreign language through a third year level; if you've taken three or four years of a language in high school, you can probably test out of a year or two in college, but if you haven't, there's no way you're passing out of that requirement.

At my high school it was required to have 2 years of foreign language.

How it works is that IF you take a language (the only options are Spanish or French) for BOTH (it has to be both) your 7th and 8th grade years, then you get one year of HS Foreign Language credit--which meant you only needed 1 more year of a language. We also have credit by exams, so if lets say you wanted to test out of Spanish, you took the credit by exam and if you got a 4 or 5 then you'd get the credit w/o having to take the class.

W/ the credit by exam, you could test out of both years of a foreign language, as long as you passed each correlating exam. My best friend did that---she tested out of our 1st year of Spanish.

At UTEP (i'm not sure how it works elsewhere in TX) you are REQUIRED to take a pre-exam before you can take a Spanish or French class. So essentially, it didn't matter how many years of a language you took. If you scored poorly on the test you were required to take the lowest language class, and visa versa if you scored highly on the test.

Originally Posted by PeppyGPhiB

This brings up another question: so we know it's possible now to graduate high school in three years. But why would you want to? For geniuses I get it, but to just get it over and done with, why would anyone push themselves/their teen to do it? By the time I was to my jr/sr year in high school, I wanted to enjoy every bit of time with my friends that I could.

For the people that did it at my high school, it was solely for the scholarship you'd receive for getting it. True $1000 is not a lot, but when you can use it on whatever (it wasn't necessarily earmarked for only tuition), its a desirable option.