College Admissions Requirements for Science: Rose Hulman
To answer the question of whether colleges will accept applicants from Portage who graduate with four semesters of science instead of the traditional two years, a handful of admissions officers were contacted by the Portage Administration, and they all will accept the new semester courses, as reported on the PortagePS web site.
While it's comforting to know the University of Michigan and no doubt many other schools will accept semester science courses, there are a large number of Portage graduates who will apply to many different colleges each year. Can we be assured that these schools will accept students who have four semester science classes on their high school transcript? One example is the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology which is a very good Engineering school in Indiana. As posted on their web site, they require applicants to have one year of Chemistry and one year of Physics (Click here). For the Portage honors student who takes one of the IB-HL courses, he/she will graduate with only a half year of Chemistry and two and a half of Physics, or vice versa unless he/she is willing to double up one year on science (and give up other electives that would otherwise broaden his or her experience). It would be a shame if any Portage student is denied entrance to a good school over this issue, and the Portage Administration is convinced all that matters to Colleges is how much science the student took rather than the type of science. Yet for Rose Hulman, they have a general requirement for four years of Math, but the science requirement is specific and it calls for one year of Chemistry and one year of Physics.
It does not appear to be wise for Portage to be (apparently) the first school in the country to change to this semester science plan.
College bound students should be allowed to take full-year courses so they meet the admissions requirements of all mainstream colleges. Furthermore, qualifying for admission is only half the battle. The other important issue is what kind of background is needed to do well after you're accepted, and it seems PPS is too focused on what it takes to be accepted (though even there they're misguided) and not enough on what it takes to succeed in college (witness the Integrated Math fiasco and the impact that's had on recent Portage graduates).
The Portage curriculum development staff and the Board of Education keep telling us this change is not an experiment. If not, we're left wondering what kind of change would be considered an experiment.
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