Homeschool World Forum

Hi, I am a little confused with how many hours of study one needs to earn a credit. My daughter is in tenth grade although I've never really payed attention to the hours I am trying to organize things as I am confusing myself daily. We are located in NY. I am also looking into CLEP exams. I have read here that they count as credit for high school. Is that additional to for example US History that she has taken for 1 semester should I count that as a credit and also the CLEP exam? Thank you in advance.

There is no official set hours in NY for a credit/unit for homeschoolers per the official regulations. Our district states that a unit (credit) is given for a total of 108 hours of instruction or 3 hours a week for 36 weeks, a 1/2 unit is 54 hours. You do not need to take the CLEP test in NY. Students can take them if they want to get College credit (although all Colleges do not accept them but most do).

For the NYS requirements you need to take so many units of the subjects. Most full unit courses are done over a year not a semester in NYS, a semester course would normally be a 1/2 credit course. Does this make sense? If your daughter has done only 1 semester of US she would need to do another semester of US to fullfill the 1 unit of US history that is required by the state no matter if she takes the CLEP or not. Now you could do a class on the Civil War or The Depression and have that for a semester and that would be the other 1/2 a unit you would need. US History, Economics and Government are the only required history courses along with 2 history electives (usually a world history or something like that). Economics and Government each need to be 1/2 a unit.

Thank you for this information. It has helped me a lot.

CLEP exams are accepted as high school credit, usually as first-year college credit, and sometimes as second-year credit. Different colleges have different point standards for credit, however, so some colleges may require higher CLEP scores. You should contact colleges directly to find out what their standards are. For high school, I certainly recommend taking as many exams as possible, it's easier than the alternate paperwork.

No, you're right, NY is rather strict and you'd still have to fulfill the hours and take the achievement tests. In terms of hours per credit, a good guideline to use is that each credit represents an hour of instruction time per week for 15 weeks, with maybe a couple hours of homework per instruction hour. So 3 credit hours would be 3 * 15 = 45 base hours, + another 90 hours of homework = 135 total hours. Of course, this is an upper limit, most courses are easier and require much less homework time. And homeschooling allows you to work year-round, meaning you can spread the work across a lot more weeks. Given the 990 minimum study hours per year for grades 7-12 in NY, it ought to be easily possible to manage 24-30 credits of work.

You still want to take the CLEP tests, of course, since colleges like standardized test scores. It makes it easier to compare you to everyone else.