Homeschool World Forum

[isafer]

Hi my name is Isabel Fernandez and I'm currently a junior. My mother and I have decided that I should be homeschooled this year. Some of the reasons why are that I'm having a lot of problems in the school I was going to enroll and the courses which are available in this is school are very few and not the ones I'm interested in. Another thing is that I'm staying in this State only one year and they (the coordinators themselves) have told me that it would be better to go back to Florida (which is where I have been attending school) because in the process of moving to another state and then moving again, some of my credits might be lost . My grades are very important to me . Anyways my questions are: if I get homeschooled this year and earn all my credits... will those credits count in the high school I will be attending in my senior year? will there be any trouble evaluating them? how about the standarized tests and GPA? and the AP course's exams? I am sorry for asking so many questions but I really need a lot of help... since I don't know what to do.... pls share your opinion and advice with me ... thanx

[Theodore]

If you take standardized tests such as AP or CLEP, then all the high school will care about is your test scores, not where you studied for the tests. If you don't take standardized tests, they'll probably accept your work, but only if you keep decent records of everything. They could also have you take some sort of placement exam, or theoretically not accept your work at all, so it's best to call them up and find out what their placement policy is regarding homeschoolers. Get it in writing if possible.

As for GPA, you'll just have to calculate that on your own based on how well you think you learned the material. The nice thing about homeschooling is you can boost your GPA whenever you want by going back and restudying any parts you aren't sure on
_________________
The Farming Game - Software Edition for PC, Mac, Linux
The board game has sold over 350,000 copies worldwide, garnered many awards, is used by over 2,000 schools, and is used extensively by homeschoolers.

[isafer]

thanks for the advice.... I do have more questions though... where do you take the AP exams? and how do I calculate my GPA ? sorry I'm a bit confused .... about the GPA...

[Theodore]

AP exams can be taken at any school or college, and some other places as well. See the following for info on AP:
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html

GPA is the score for the questions you got right divided by the score for the total number of questions, applied to a letter grade. For instance, if you do a math set with 30 questions and get 2 wrong, your GPA is 28/30, or 0.93333..., which you multiply by 100 to get 93%. Since 90% and up is an A, you get the A GPA of the full 4 points. Add or subtract 0.3 for a + or - (though 4 is as high as you get for an A). Then to calculate average GPA across a number of courses, add all together your GPA's multiplied by the number of credit hours for each course, and divide by the total number of credit hours. For instance, if you have 3 courses with GPA's of 4 for 3 credit hours, 3.7 for 3 credit hours, and 3 for 4 credit hours, your average is (4*3 + 3.7*3 + 3*4) / 10, or (12 + 11.1 + 12) / 10, or 3.51.

That might be a little hard to work through if you're not strong in math, so you may want to use a GPA calculator instead to simplify the process:
http://www.back2college.com/gpa.htm
http://www.aad.berkeley.edu/gpacalc.html

You can get the number of credit hours for a subject by comparing what you've done to course descriptions for the same subject online. You may have to estimate grades, especially for coursework with subjective grading, but just do your best.
_________________
The Farming Game - Software Edition for PC, Mac, Linux
The board game has sold over 350,000 copies worldwide, garnered many awards, is used by over 2,000 schools, and is used extensively by homeschoolers.