This situation can sometimes be commonplace for homeschooled students and those in independent study programs where they don’t have access to the laboratories n

This situation can sometimes be commonplace for homeschooled students and those in independent study programs where they don’t have access to the laboratories needed to do lab sciences such as chemistry and physics. This can also happen in schools where they offer courses that fulfill the minimum state requirements for a high school diploma but do not fulfill the requirements to enter a university. For example, some California high schools offer three tracks: (1) a basic track, (2) a college-prep track, and (3) a honors/Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate track that is geared toward preparing students for admissions to top universities. For example, for biology, track #1 would be called “life science,” track #2 would be called “biology,” and track #3 would be Honors/AP/IB Biology. However, there are many high schools that only offer track #1 courses. For example, for high school roughly 20 years ago in Sacramento, California I went to an independent study charter school where I met with a teacher roughly once a week and did my assignments primarily from home. My parents sent me to this school as an alternative to the low-performing, rather violent high school that I was assigned to attend. At the time I was a student there, there was no chemistry course offered (though biology was offered, and during my senior year physics was offered), but most of the universities I was interested in required a year of chemistry. I had two options: (1) take chemistry at another high school or (2) take an equivalent chemistry course at a community college. I opted for option #2; while this course was more basic than AP Chemistry and thus was not equivalent to that course, it was equivalent to high school chemistry, and because I took it at a community college I earned both high school and college credit. I ended up taking seven community college courses in Spanish (my high school Spanish teacher left in the middle of the school year and it was unclear whether she’d be replaced, and so I took three semesters of Spanish at community college, which credit-wise was equivalent to four years of high school Spanish), chemistry, and computer science while I was in high school. This helped me get into Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I earned my bachelor’s degree in computer science. I think it’s a good thing when colleges recognize that not everybody goes to competitive high schools with a wide array of college-prep courses. Students in these situations have to do the best they can with the resources they have, such as taking community college courses or taking AP tests.