Jayne, thanks for the information. That's a really informative post.
For math and science, students should do ALL the problems in the text book as well as ALL the problems in another textbook, rather than just what the professor assigns. By another textbook I mean the texts used by a large, accredited, well-respected school. ALL the problems - the easy ones can be excluded if they are truly trivial.
Austin, you'd think that is enough! But we have had a different experience.
If you know what university you child is going to go to when they begin doing college work, my advice is to skip anything associated with the high school (Dept head, counselor, laison between hi school and college, even college professor) and go to the
head of each college dept. They will explain how their dept's philosophy and course load is set up.
For example, at my daughter's college, Calculus is taught from one book - a massive book. Calc I, II, and III. It integrates a lot of other subjects than math. Other advanced areas of math are integrated in periodically, along with sciences. So Calc I has random advanced math concepts taught to help build the foundation for a future math course...and same with sciences.This is due to the fact that students who take Calc, especially after Calc I, will be taking a lot of math/science courses at the same time! They need this foundation to succeed in these other classes. It's way different than high school thinking (Master the info and go on).
So...if my daughter didn't go talk to the head and find out what was covered
exactly, she probably would have gone into Calc III. However, she found out that at this school she didn't know all of the other math/science inserted in Calc II. She came to understand that she knew enough to go into Calc II under their guidelines.
It isn't just math either. With English, it may be expected that they have mastered the differences between MLA and APA writing in class. Being familiar isn't always enough. Also, that they can produce "on demand" writing that is the quality of a final draft. She DID skip over the first 2 levels of English she earned credit for...only after talking to the head of that dept. Their big thing was being able to write "on demand" very quickly, being able to easily write the different types of essays - persuasive, argumentative, informational, narrative (all views), scientific, and more...writing them in the correct format, with little editing needed, good vocabulary. It is a lot, but she has ADHD and speeds through no problem with her writing. She knew she had this one covered.
Of course, it depends on the rigor of the university and each dept.
The best advice is to not assume anything. Don't trust your high school connections on any of this, and just go to the source (THE college/university or at least the most difficult one around). Also, talking to other college students helps tremendously.
