Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Has anyone had experience with their kid doing this? Our high school has limited classes and blocked my rising Junior into a situation where they have to squeeze in the required biology class into summer or online this year or make a wild gamble that they'd be able to fit it into their schedule during a packed senior year. Wondering if anyone has any experience with these classes. How was taking the required End of Course Bio exam?

I hear AP Bio online with OPTG but since the kid is already doing a full load of IB classes this year, I'd think that'd be daunting.

Thanks for any input!

You can't take it for original credit over the summer, and OPTG is for people who are unable to attend regular school, not because they want to fill their schedule will electives.

So OP's child has no options in MCPS? That can't be true.

Anonymous wrote:It’s online pathways to graduation. It’s a program to prevent kids from dropping out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think you meant to say that since your kid had to be special and not follow the school recommended science pathways there are now having trouble fitting in a required course usually completed in 9th grade. You are unlikely to get a personal experience comment, because most people don’t do this.

If they are in an IBDP program, what science are they taking? AP Bio has Biology as a prerequisite and you don’t want to wait until senior year to take the MISA. I think your kid should take Honors Bio through OPTG during this school year and take the MISA in spring.

Not the OP, but my class of 2025 kid took Honors Physics as a freshman because it was offered as an option for freshman, as long as they were taking Algebra 2 concurrently. This was listed as an approved option when they registered in 8th grade.

But I gather it was a relatively new option, because the school didn’t seem to have fully thought through the whole pathway for IB students. Either that or they made some changes on the IB side of things, maybe when they got a new IB coordinator. I’m not sure. It did seem like the counselors were kind of scrambling to advise when my kid met with them to choose classes for 10th grade.

Either way, they ended up having to take both Honors Bio and Honors Chemistry in 10th grade in order to satisfy all the requirements and also be eligible to take an IB science course in 11th/12th. I gather some MCPS schools do allow students to take AP/IB science courses without the honors version as a prerequisite, but my kid was told it wasn’t allowed. If they hadn’t been doing IB, they would have just taken one science in 10th and the other in 11th.

If they hadn’t already been splitting health A and B over two different summers (the B course wasn’t ready until the summer before their senior year), I suspect my kid might have preferred to do Bio as a summer course. They found that Bio was much easier after having had physics, and taking it in conjunction with chemistry. A lot of the concepts the freshmen seemed to be struggling with were much easier to grasp because they had some foundational knowledge from the other science courses.

Anonymous wrote:I think you meant to say that since your kid had to be special and not follow the school recommended science pathways there are now having trouble fitting in a required course usually completed in 9th grade. You are unlikely to get a personal experience comment, because most people don’t do this.

If they are in an IBDP program, what science are they taking? AP Bio has Biology as a prerequisite and you don’t want to wait until senior year to take the MISA. I think your kid should take Honors Bio through OPTG during this school year and take the MISA in spring.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Has anyone had experience with their kid doing this? Our high school has limited classes and blocked my rising Junior into a situation where they have to squeeze in the required biology class into summer or online this year or make a wild gamble that they'd be able to fit it into their schedule during a packed senior year. Wondering if anyone has any experience with these classes. How was taking the required End of Course Bio exam?

I hear AP Bio online with OPTG but since the kid is already doing a full load of IB classes this year, I'd think that'd be daunting.

Thanks for any input!

You can't take it for original credit over the summer, and OPTG is for people who are unable to attend regular school, not because they want to fill their schedule will electives.

Anonymous wrote:Has anyone had experience with their kid doing this? Our high school has limited classes and blocked my rising Junior into a situation where they have to squeeze in the required biology class into summer or online this year or make a wild gamble that they'd be able to fit it into their schedule during a packed senior year. Wondering if anyone has any experience with these classes. How was taking the required End of Course Bio exam?

I hear AP Bio online with OPTG but since the kid is already doing a full load of IB classes this year, I'd think that'd be daunting.

Thanks for any input!

Anonymous wrote:I think you meant to say that since your kid had to be special and not follow the school recommended science pathways there are now having trouble fitting in a required course usually completed in 9th grade. You are unlikely to get a personal experience comment, because most people don’t do this.

If they are in an IBDP program, what science are they taking? AP Bio has Biology as a prerequisite and you don’t want to wait until senior year to take the MISA. I think your kid should take Honors Bio through OPTG during this school year and take the MISA in spring.