Homeschooling for College Credit: A Pre-Med Guide

The AAMC reports that most doctors knew they wanted to become doctors as early as middle school! If that’s true in your home, and you have an aspiring doctor, there are some aspects of your Homeschooling for College Credit program that you’ll want to monitor closely so your student’s early college credit can be used later. I’ll give you the admissions requirements for med school as well, so you can begin planning.

Sequence of Education

High school diploma –> bachelor’s degree –> medical school admissions –> medical school

When you’re talking about Homeschooling for College Credit, you’re talking about taking college classes in high school. As you can see from the educational sequence, there can be as many as 8 years between today and their start of medical school, so we actually need to be very clear about what can go wrong when you start too early, and how to be smart with your HS4CC plans.

First, you must reverse-engineer the process. When you are talking about medical school, none of the college credit they earn before medical school will “count,” but their medical school admissions requirements need to be met during their bachelor’s degree. This is important to think about because they will apply for medical school at the end of their bachelor’s degree, not the beginning, and we have to start by looking at the age of their medical school admissions. (All admissions are linked below.)

Looking at admissions, your student’s bachelor’s degree program does not have to be “premed,” but rather it can be in any major. It does, however, need to include specific sciences that are for science majors in order to qualify for admissions at most medical schools.

General Biology 1 & 2 with Lab
General Chemistry 1 & 2 with Lab
General or University Physics 1 & 2 with Lab
Organic Chemistry / Biochemistry with Lab

These 8 classes will form the science backbone of your student’s science GPA, preparation for the Medical School Admissions Test (MCAT), and the foundation of all medical sciences. For those reasons, it is beneficial that these 8 classes be taken at the university during the bachelor’s degree rather than before it during high school. Most bachelor’s degrees will happily accept credits earned during high school, but HS4CC advice recommends against that plan. Instead, your student should take the most rigorous high school sciences possible, and that can be a homeschool class, community college sciences, or even a homeschool COOP, but if your student doesn’t take high school science, the rigorous general courses listed above will be VERY VERY challenging for your student. A good suggestion is to use “Intro” level college sciences as a high school class. These are not intended for science majors and won’t be used to meet premed requirements; these are simply to use as an option to enhance their high school science program. If possible, on campus is preferred, but online is available at nearly every college for dual enrollment. No matter which options you choose, be sure to include a lab component that allows your student to get hands-on experience doing science labs and writing lab reports. These will be required in the general science sequence they take later.

A note about sciences taken during your bachelor’s degree: While the most competitive programs will be hyper-selective, it is also not uncommon to see medical requirements that allow your prerequisites to come from online coursework, the community college, and even AP/CLEP. (example: see University of Iowa) But that type of flexibility is best used for NON-SCIENCE courses.

How to Homeschool for College Credit while Pre-Med

Since your student must be heavily committed to their science sequence, it can be helpful to Homeschool for College Credit some of the “off” courses to either lighten their courseload, shorten the length of time needed to earn their bachelor’s degree, or to reduce costs.

Old credit: Homeschooling for College Credit means bringing in credit earned during high school. Since these credits will be “older” than the rest, so be mindful of earning credit in subjects where currency is needed. For example, avoid technology courses and science courses.
Pass/fail credit: Using AP or CLEP to earn college credit is an excellent way to earn college credit on subjects that are not prerequisites or part of your major. For instance, if you plan to major in Psychology, you should avoid the psychology CLEP and AP exams in favor of graded credit.
“cr” from graded credit: in almost every case, a university will bring in “cr” or “credit” from your dual enrollment graded credit. These grades are not gone, but they won’t be part of your student’s institutional GPA for their bachelor’s degree. Expect to provide transcripts from dual enrollment, even after your student earns a degree, but be mindful that you WANT graded credit earned directly at the institution issuing your bachelor’s degree, as part of the prerequisites, science sequence, major, or minor.
Best bets: The very best HS4CC credit for these students will come from foreign language (or languages), off-major liberal arts like literature, ethics, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, government, anthropology, and economics. Other great options include electives like business, accounting, or health care.

High school students should visit the AAMC.org website and carefully read the entire section “Explore Medicine: High School Students,” because there is SO MUCH MORE to the process than whether or not they should earn college credit.