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Course Selection
UPPER SCHOOL COURSE SELECTION
The mission of our Upper School course selection process is to enable each student to chart a rich and challenging path through a curriculum designed to prepare them for a world that needs their leadership. Given the range in pace and rigor across our course offerings, we strive to guide students toward courses in which they can both stretch and thrive and which, taken together, comprise an overall load that does not overwhelm them beyond capacity. Always, our guiding principle is Excellence with Humanity.
Rigor in the Upper School Program
Most of our departments offer core courses at either two or three levels; the table above shows the typical course progressions for each department by grade. The majority of our classes are designated as advanced or grade-level (note that grade-level courses lack the qualifier for honors, AP, or advanced). These advanced and grade-level courses cover discipline-specific content with substantial depth and challenge. Most of the sections in multi-level courses are offered at grade-level (for two-level courses) or advanced-level (for three-level courses), and those courses provide plenty of depth and challenge. A smaller number of sections in each discipline are offered at the honors or AP level. In terms of rigor, honors- and AP-designated courses are considered equal to each other and typically represent the most challenging options in the course progression. Enrollment in any advanced or honors/AP class requires a departmental recommendation; our honors/AP level courses require a demonstrable pattern of excellence in the discipline.
Placement Recommendations and Course Counseling
Placement recommendations for multi-level courses are generated by the academic departments and aim to find the best fit for each student. The process varies by department, and course recommendations generally rely on grades, the current teacher ’ s understanding of the student’ s learning profile, the support and input of the department chair regarding the content and skill trajectory of the next course, and, where appropriate, placement tests. Our course counselors then partner with the student and family to look holistically at the recommendations to create an overall course and rigor mix across the disciplines based on the student’ s academic interests and overall commitments.
