Some Undergraduate Courses are Simply a Rerun of High school

In an effort to be more efficient with time, I studied the Fairfax County School System’s high school curriculum. In examining all of the options for a typical high school student I compared them to available DSST and CLEP tests and found some surprising results.

There is significant overlap between high school classes and undergraduate classes in college. How can we best harness our time? As a high school student, after finals, you can brush up on content with a study guide, and then take the test. While it isn’t the most fun way to spend summer, at the end of your high school career, you can have a fair amount of your first year or two of college done, and can take that gap year or shorten your college costs and experience with zero guilt!

Below is an example of the overlap for a typical high school student, and this is by no means all inclusive:

Grade	High School Class	Test Equivalent for College	ACE Recommended Credits
9	Biology	CLEP Biology	3
9	Cybersecurity Fundamentals	CLEP Fundamentals of Cybersecurity	3
9	Principles of Business	DSST Introduction to Business	3
10	Business Law	CLEP Business Law	3
10	Principles of Marketing	Clep Principles of Marketing	3
10	World History	CLEP Western Civilization 1 and 2 (not an exact match, but close)	6
11	US History	CLEP History I and CLEP History II	6
11	Economics and Personal Finance	DSST Personal Finance, CLEP Macroeconomics, CLEP Microeconomics	9
11	Computer Science	DSST Introduction to Computing and Information Technology	3
12	Psychology	CLEP Psychology	3
12	Government	CLEP American Government	3
12	English	DSST English Comp II	3
12	Algebra I and II	CLEP College Algebra	3

The total for the example above is 51 credits, and all you have to do is take your high school finals, maybe order a small study guide and learn the few bits on the test and take it! This approach can save many thousands of dollars and shave your college experience nearly in half.

~The Owl