One of the many things Pleasant Valley offers in order to be “Committed to Excellence” is a plethora of advanced classes. In addition to honors and AP classes, Pleasant Valley also offers dual credit classes.
By taking these courses, students are able to get college credit while still in high school. However, these classes may not prepare students adequately once they get to college.
“The problem with courses in high schools that offer credit for college is that they are exactly that: high school courses,” said Senior Guilherme Pinho. “In the end, you run a very real possibility of getting to, for example, Calculus 2 in freshman year of university, while most classmates will be sophomores.”
However, the exact difficulty of dual credit classes is up for debate. Senior Khaled Ismail commented, “While the difficulty of a dual credit class depends on the course and teacher, most classes are not harder than an AP class, but still harder than any other high school class.”
Regardless of exactly how hard these classes are, however, they are beneath the thoroughness of an AP class, which is also supposed to be at the level of an introductory college class. While many people may take a college class in order to get an “easy A,” they are setting themselves up for failure at the college level.
“The problem is that their experience with calculus has been entirely through the university, at a university level. The teacher will then teach it accordingly, but you may be at a loss from having a course that most likely was ‘streamlined’,” said Pinho.
As a result of this “streamlined” course, students won’t have as firm of a grasp of the material as their classmates and are thereby setting themselves up for failure. Once students get to college, they will have to understand what they missed by taking a dual credit class while also learning new material.
If dual credit classes were made more difficult, this wouldn’t be a problem. Students would be adequately prepared for classes and be set to succeed in college. In order to be truly “Committed to Excellence,” Pleasant Valley should take care of students now and prepare them for the future.
