Purely hypothetical of course. Let’s say you have a fairly good-for-age 12 year old that can run a 30 second 200 and a 6:00 mile. Let’s also say they live in a complete vacuum and the only thing they want to do with their life is break 4:00 in the mile at any point, whether it’s at 18 or 28 years old. If you were their hypothetical coach, would it be more effective to train them like a 400 runner until they break 60, then an 800 runner until they break 2:00, then a miler until they finally break 4:00, or should you just stick with miler training? In my mind, since you’re working with them over many years with one goal while they go through puberty, evolving the training as they develop seems reasonable, but the simple argument of “they’re a miler. Train them like a miler” definitely holds water.

(We got quite desperate for conversation topics on our long run this morning)

Hey all, I’m a rising college senior, and I found this sub pretty helpful when I was applying for college, so I figured I’d give back somehow. I’ve seen some pretty inaccurate things said about how much college credit you can expect from your advanced high school coursework, so I figured I’d give one example of what one person actually got (if you can’t tell from my wording, I’m fully aware that other people may get more/less credit than I did, I’m just one example). I took 11 AP classes and 4 dual enrollment courses

Courses that transferred directly:

AP calculus BC
AP stats
DE calc 3

Yes, that’s literally it. These were the only courses that gave me course credit for a class I would have had to take for my degree. I got credit for calc 1-3 and stats.

Courses that let me start out in more advanced courses:

AP physics 1
AP physics C: mechanics
AP physics C: E&M
AP computer science principles
AP computer science A

I’m a physics major with a CS minor, and it’s policy at my school to not let people majoring in a subject to outright skip an intro class in that subject, making students take the honors version of a class instead. In exchange, though, departments offer quite advanced and interesting honors courses. So instead of taking physics 1 and 2 with 150 other science/engineering majors, I took it with 25 other physics majors and learned a lot more material and did a final project poster presentation that we presented to the physics faculty. Similar idea with CS. I did not think this held me back in any way, and I quite enjoyed these courses.

Courses that sorta transferred:

AP macro
AP micro
AP US gov
APUSH

I say sorta for a couple reasons. First, I’m required to take 4 gen ed courses, and only 2 of them can be AP credit, so I can’t exactly say which of these 4 classes fill those 2 spots. Second, while calc BC transferred as course number 21-121 and 21-122, for example, these courses transferred as something like 24-011. Typical courses in college are one hundred level, two hundred level, etc, but these 4 were all zero hundred level. You can’t actually enroll in them as a student, you can only get credit for them by transferring an AP course. I haven’t taken any more advanced courses in these subjects so I have no idea how these courses work as prerequisites.

Courses I couldn’t/didn’t transfer:

DE linear algebra
DE differential equations
DE reading, writing and inquiry

The 2 math courses were taken through a state university and simply weren’t considered advanced enough to count for transfer credit. I put the reading/writing course in bold because I chose not to transfer it intentionally. It would have transferred as 76-101, the easiest reading/writing class at my school. However, at my school, all first year students are required to take a reading/writing course *at the school*, so if I had transferred in 76-101, I would not have been allowed to take it again and would have been stuck just taking a more advanced reading/writing course my freshman year.

I hope this helped give some perspective on how these credits transfer. I’ve seen a lot of high school students and teachers telling other high school students that “taking dual enrollment is better than AP because it always transfers to your college”, and as you can see that’s just not true. I don’t outright regret taking any of these courses in high school, but I also didn’t take any of them with the sole, or even primary, goal of getting college credit. If that had been my intention, I would probably regret quite a few of them.

I know this doesn’t work or else people would do it, but what specifically is stopping this from happening?