Day: March 18, 2013

Why would anyone ever want to go to a college where cows never wander around on campus?  Kelly took both of the pictures below in the Brickyard at NCSU today.  If they do n0t have an Ag school, it is highly likely they are not studying anything important.

Day 574 of 1000

This is the second in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Our kids both skipped high school, but they took different paths to do it.  It would be nice to be able to say we planned those paths based on the kids’ abilities, desires, and needs, but that would not be anywhere close to the truth.  The reality is that, when we started our homeschool, one of the furthest things from our minds was the idea that it might be a good thing to skip high school.  We did plan some of the stuff that allowed the kids to get ahead, but a lot of things happened serendipitously to bump us along toward that end.  We did not realize that a move to college out of junior high might be a worthy goal until college was already upon us.

It is interesting that the kids had such different trajectories.  I think all of this started when Kelly passed here first CLEP test for college credit at age 13.  I have written a series of posts about how to use CLEP testing both for college credit and to assure the coverage of the homeschool course material is sufficient for future performance in college.  We used CLEP testing extensively with Kelly, but sparingly with Christian, the reason having mostly to do with timing that I will discuss in future posts on the trajectory of each of them.  The upshot is that Kelly received 44 credit hours for 10 CLEP tests when she entered the community college while Christian only received 18 credit hours.  When they entered Big State U (NCSU in this case), Kelly received credit for 23 hours plus foreign language proficiency waiver based on her ACT and CLEP tests while Christian received no credit for CLEP, but got the foreign language proficiency waiver.

The 23 credit hours Kelly received gave her a huge leg up going into both Wake Tech Community College and NCSU.  She was able to schedule more elective courses and take light loads that allowed her to do other things.  Christian had to focus hard just to get all the classes he needed.  In the end, Kelly took a little extra time to get her degree, but was able to win one of the prestigious Dean’s scholarships at NCSU and came out with a broader educational experience and an Associate of Science degree from the Community College.

A second thing that happened was Christian’s participation in the Duke TIP testing.  As part of that program he took the ACT (college entrance exam) when he was in the seventh grade.  He could have taken the SAT, but the ACT was accepted by the North Carolina Department of Non-public Education as a nationally normed standardized test with respect to homeschool.  Christian did well on the test.  He got a 22 which was sufficient for statewide honors.  That would not have been good enough to get him into NCSU, but he was only in seventh grade at the time, so it got us to at least think about the concept of putting him into college a couple years after that.

We are very happy with both of these paths.  I do not believe Kelly would have prospered as much if she would have followed a path similar to the one taken by Christian.  The same thing is true for Christian.  It would have been a mistake for him to follow Kelly’s trajectory.  I will try to explain why I think this is true en the next couple of posts in this series about the different paths each took.