Yes, this really can mean that your child with AP calculus can be denied a high school diploma if they took geometry as an 8th grader and it didn't get onto a high school transcript.
Check with your school district in your area. My son's Algebra & Geometry class will not go on his H.S. transcript and he will be allowed to graduate. Although what this might mean is that is GRADES won't show up on the transcript, it is assumed he passed both classes to be enrolled in Algebra II as a freshman.
Check not only local district-- but
state Dept. of Ed.
Also know which way the wind is blowing up there at the state level. The reason that I have this caution is that many states have become
more controlling about which specific courses are "high school" standards, and they don't always write escape clauses into policy.
The real problem if your child is 6th grade is that while you can get
assurances that it won't matter... you can't get a written guarantee that it won't change under you in another 4 years, and there's no way for you to go BACK and do things differently to meet the requirements at that point, if you see what I mean.
So sure, our school would happily admit that to be taking AP statistics, my daughter
must have taken geometry. Sure. But the state says she gets a "modified diploma" unless
that class appears on her high school transcript. Since she took it in middle school, unless we'd insisted, it wouldn't have been part of her high school transript. Yes, this also means that she took her first high school math courses at nine years old, which wasn't ideal from our perspective... but from a credentialling stance, it was the safe move.
Our paranoia about this and our cover-all-the-bases approach was later vindicated when (during DD's freshman year) it suddenly happened that
now, to satisfy our state's phased graduation requirements, she was going to need to have "Geometry" on a high school transcript.
I'll also second what Val is stating above. DD observed with horror last night; "How on
earth do you get to be in ALGEBRA without having a firm grasp of how to work with basic fractions??"
She sees students like that quite regularly-- it's not that they are dumb, or that they can't do the material, and superficially, if she shows them the procedural method of working some type of problem, they can
follow the scripted method, but the real problem is that they don't understand the foundational skills that came three or four years previously. They
can't really understand what they are doing in the here and now in Algebra or Geometry because they don't understand stuff they should have learned in 3rd and 4th grade (but didn't).
