Hacker News Reader

This is the route that I took as well. I dropped out, realized I needed a GED to start community college, realized I needed to be 18 to get a GED, then took the CHSPE and everything worked out.

One of my sons took it and passed it when he was 12, because the community college wouldn’t enroll him without it. We were homeschooling, so we had a california home private school - so we just had to certify that he had completed the 10th grade in our school, which he had.

I worked around this (with parental support) by simply enrolling the local community college and getting a home-school program (which I think had some connection to Wes Beach? It's been a while...) to say "yeah, you're doing at least what you'd do in high school".

I did this too, it was great. I’m sometimes surprised by how few of the people around me in academia seem to have done anything similar.