McCallum students have several choices when it comes to choosing advanced classes. Advanced Placement courses follow a national curriculum, preparing students for the AP exam at the end of the year. OnRamps courses, offered through The University of Texas, combine high school and college content. Finally, Austin Community College courses offer students an opportunity to earn direct college credit. Each course offers different challenges and different ways to prepare students for higher education.
Junior Lucinda McCollum experienced all three types of classes in varying subjects and witnessed how the classes differ in structure and pacing. McCollum took her first OnRamps class in her freshman year.
“It was really hard taking OnRamps Precalculus freshman year, because you had to teach yourself a lot of the material,” McCollum said. “It was weird ’cause you get two grades, you get a college grade and a high school grade. I didn’t do well in the college class grade, but I did well in the high school grade.”
McCollum said that ACC courses offered a very different experience than the other college courses she had taken previously.
McCollum said that in history classes, she found AP exams to be more challenging due to their structure and expectations.
“AP World History was a lot different than ACC US History, ” McCollum said. “The AP questions are really hard and make you think more because they’re based more on the context of history as a whole, whereas ACC is asking direct questions about what’s going on so it’s a lot easier because it’s not making you think, you just have to know the material.”
AP and OnRamps English teacher Ann Marquez said that the primary differences between AP and OnRamps are the opportunities each course offers to earn college credit. In OnRamps English, major assignments are sent to the professor for scoring. At the end of the year, students can choose whether or not to accept their earned credit.
“You earn two semesters of credit in one semester by submitting essays to the university that they grade, and then they offer you a concluding grade at the end of semester that you can either accept or decline,” Marquez said. “So the biggest difference there between that and ACC is dual enrollment. You are enrolled in high school and college simultaneously, and you can choose to accept the credit or not.”
The two courses Marquez teaches, AP English Language and Composition and OnRamps English, also focus on different aspects of reading and writing techniques.
“[The AP English Language] curriculum is strong,” Marquez said. “It teaches three types of writing that will be useful in college: the argumentation, synthesis and rhetorical analysis. We also focus on American literature. In OnRamps, there are no books involved. It’s heavily research based, and the writing is similar as far as rhetorical analysis, argumentation, persuasion and synthesis.”
From a financial standpoint, Marquez believes that OnRamps offers a better deal for parents.
“As a parent, an OnRamps student has more than one opportunity to gain the college grade per semester, as opposed to just a single test at the end of the semester, which is what AP does,” Marquez said. “Also, as a parent, I think you get a better value for your money, because the student can earn the college credit in a single year for an entire freshman year of English credit, which saves a lot of money.”
Junior Lila Dreher has taken AP, OnRamps and ACC classes. She currently takes four AP classes and prefers them for their structure.
“I prefer AP classes because they’re more structured,” Dreher said. “I like the structure of the class and that there’s a big test at the end that you’re just leading up to and you’re preparing for that.”
In contrast to the structured style of AP, Dreher said she finds ACC courses to be more independent.
“I definitely recommend the ACC classes, because I think they’re a lot more like self paced which appeals to a lot of people, because they can kind of just pace themselves, and they can do it over the summer if they want to.”
Dreher said that while advanced courses can be difficult to manage, the payoff is worth it.
“I think they all have their benefits, and taking advanced courses is definitely difficult, but if you stay on top of your work, they’re definitely worth it.”