Choose Your High School Coursework with Care

Question: My son and daughter are a rising junior and senior. They'll be meeting with their guidance counselor soon to pick courses for next year. What should they be thinking about?

Answer: by Joseph J. O'Brien Jr (Educational Consultant)

First, it is always advisable to have a tentative four year plan when choosing your freshman year courses. That puts the student on a path that enables him to anticipate future courses while also allowing for changes to satisfy new interests. Having such a plan also makes it easier to decide on the next year's course selection.

But whether or not your sophomore son has a plan in place, he should be thinking about whether any colleges he's considering have particular course and test requirements. For example, some colleges or majors within a college might require two lab sciences or recommend a particular SAT subject test.

If there are no special requirements to meet, your son should be thinking about the courses that logically follow from the courses he's already taken, the courses he will enjoy and the courses that put him in a position to compete for a place in all of the colleges he will eventually apply to. Of courses, the courses needed to make a strong college applicant aren't always the most enjoyable courses, and that's where hard choices must be made.

Recently, when asked a similar question to yours, the President of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Bill McClintick, said that most experienced admission officers would say, "We want to see if they have taken the most rigorous courses available to them at their particular school and how they have performed in those classes."

This adage will also serve your daughter well. Senior year is no time to take it easy. College will notice any drop off in the level of courses selected for senior year, and they won't like it. This is a time for her to continue to take as demanding course load as she can reasonably expect to succeed in. In fact, this should be every student's guiding principle in selecting next year's courses.