Hacker News Reader

Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school

I'm not sure about that. When I interviewed at Google, everybody seemed very impressed that I finished half my Honours degree before I graduated from high school at age 17. I had far more questions about my experience with concurrent high school and university than I did about doing my doctorate at Oxford.

But on the broader point, I absolutely agree -- if I was looking to hire someone, this would get an immediate reaction of "this takes way too much work to comprehend; trash it and move on to the next candidate".

View on HN

You have an anomalous school story. Feel free to revise my recommendation if you are some kind of crazy child prodigy and you think it's going to help you to point that out.

Its nice, shows dedication. Earning a ton of college credits is not about just being smart, tons of dedication needed.

Yeah, but dedication to the schooling environment and being a good employee are 2 different things really. Earning these credits might just be about cramming, I assume most of them are awarded based on exams? I've seen plenty of people preform well on set academic goals that can be gamed without actually taking much away from it. At least with college you usually have things like a software project, assignments and possibly a internship which are a bit harder to cram your way through.

It really tell you knowing abut how the employee is going to approach problems and how creative their solutions will be.

Maybe things are different in the US, but "earned 64 college credits before graduating from high school" sounds pretty anomalous to me -- isn't that half a degree?

It is a little more simple if you go to a boarding school, in my experience.

speaking as someone whose college education was aided by a significant amount of AP credit, this is a silly thing to brag about. Schools will vary by which AP exams they accept and how many hours they award, and I'm sure this is true about all pre-college transfer credit.

It's at least equivalent to bragging about your SAT score.

If it's dual-enrollment credit that would be a bit more meaningful than AP credits. Still kind of a silly thing to put on a resume, I think.

"isn't that half a degree?"

Probably not. Most "college credit" earned in US high schools is unfocused coursework that gets you out of (some of) your general-ed requirements. Lots of universities won't even transfer the stuff, and if they do, it's not typically treated as real college credit.

Aside from that, thanks to the prevalence of AP courses it's much easier (and more common) for high school kids to get college credits today. It's definitely not as impressive as it used to be, and citing the number of credits earned as if it were some kind of score is silly, at best. It's the sort of thing you brag about when you have nothing real to brag about.

Aha, quite different from Canada, then. Up here it's unusual for students to get any college credit while in high school, and when it happens it's typically no more than 10-15 credits of AP or IB credits.

I won't say it's common, but it isn't all that unusual in the US either, at least among my group of friends. I came in with only 20-something hours and was on the low end (really focued on my math, finished all the necessary credits for my Comp Sci. degree before leaving high school). A friend of mine, on the other hand, came in with just under 70 credits, but they were all the gen-ed with some upper level math thrown in. While that'd normally be a little over half a degree, she added a second major that balanced it out.

A number of my friends did this though, so I don't think it's quite as big of an accomplishment in the US than elsewhere. Though I'll be the first to admit that my group of friends tended to be the high achievers in high school/university.

-- A undergraduate in CS/Mathematics

Yeah, that's what it was like in the US 10-15 years ago. AP courses were still pretty new/unique when I was in high school, but these days they're as common as clubs or intramural sports.

One thing I hate about bragging about that sort of thing is that it's (unfortunately) more of a reflection on the quality of the high school you attended than it is on your character. The best students at the worst high schools in the US don't have the same access to AP courses as the average student at the best high schools.

Actually, this is true. If I look just one district over, the math level stopped somewhere around Trig. I think. For my cousins who lived just a few hours away, again, the schools didn't offer much. I think that there is something to be said for taking advantage of the opportunities that are provided to you--but we should be aware of the impact of luck in determining what opportunities we are presented with....

With that having been said, what do suggest we can do to help out with districts with less resources? I've done a lot of outreach, but it often feels like a drop in the bucket....

I started with 48 credits and it does get the basic math and general ed requirements out of the way. That way, I could start graduate physics and math course by my 2nd year at the university....

But, we take students from some magnet schools here to intern and they're amazing (multivariate calc, AP physics, and a year of Java--before senior year. The student had worked on a team project and was commenting his code unprompted...). I invited a Canadian colleague to a group meeting where they presented what they were working on she was stunned...I think that in the US when students have opportunities, it's great--the difficulty is how to improve the average....

Washington State has had a program for decades where you can go to a community college for the last two years of high school, for free. I earned an associate's degree instead of a high school diploma.

Correct, but it's the irrelevant half: general education and introductory courses. Also, Florida actively encourages dual enrollment, where high-school students in their 11th year begin working on an associates degree at a community college. The students picked for dual enrollment have to be decent, but the aren't exactly the cream; plus the community colleges they attend aren't very good either. It's basically a way of having something like the AP program (minus the rigor) by outsourcing the education to another school.

Nope, I had nearly 80 units going into UC Berkeley but am still taking four years to graduate, not to mention taking 5 classes or so a semester...

I could truthfully say the same thing. It isn't listed on my resume because I have done things since the age of 18, too, and many of them are more impressive to a decision maker at a tech company.

At the best high school in Illinois you'd have roughly 2% of the graduating class be within shooting distance of that number, just to give you an approximation.

I had around 60, but was only able to effectively make use of 30 or so... maybe not even that. Extra "credits" don't really help when your major is already heavy on required courses.

Google also has weird requirements over a candidate's schooling, more than just about any other employer I've ever seen. People with 20 years of experience get quizzed about their schooling decades before during interviews.

Maybe it's to continue to encourage schooling on the whole, which makes their job of selecting a candidate that little bit easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com