A student stands in front of a whiteboard and completes equations. According to counselor Kanika Barnett-Jewell, students enrolled at Move On When Ready institutions take classes that show they are being challenged. “More and more, we’re seeing that schools are accepting of the college credit, but they do wanna see a variety, and what it boils down to is they wanna see rigor,” Barnett-Jewell said.
By VALERIA GARCIA-POZO – News Editor
Clarke Central High School students are presented with the opportunity to take college classes at a variety of institutions. However, with the program come challenges beyond those of a regular classroom environment.
The Move On When Ready program allows Clarke County School District students to enroll and take classes at the Career Academy, Athens Technical College, the University of North Georgia and the University of Georgia. The differing requirements for each institution reflect the level of difficulty that classes at each institution will entail for high school students.
“The GPA requirement (for UGA), I believe is a 3.9 and the SAT requirement, I believe, is a 1400. For the ACT, they’re looking for at least a 31 composite score, so those are really some pretty high numbers, and that’s really typically the minimum,” counselor Kanika Barnett-Jewell said.
However, senior William White, who is enrolled at UGA in addition to taking classes at CCHS, says the application requirements were more flexible than they seemed at face value.
“I think I was the only person at Central who really got (the required SAT score) in the first round, based on meeting the cutoff, but then afterwards, they admitted a lot of people who hadn’t made that cut-off, so that was kind of strange, but I’m glad they did,” White said.
According to White, MOWR offers classes not offered at CCHS.
“(I decided to dual enroll) partially because the greater breadth of courses I’d be offered, ’cause there’s just more language courses,” White said.
Although MOWR allows students to explore further options, Barnett-Jewell expresses the decision to enroll at a college or remain with advanced placement courses has pros and cons.
“I don’t necessarily recommend one or the other,” Barnett-Jewell said. “If you dual enroll here in the state of Georgia, that college credit will transfer to any school within the state of Georgia. With the AP courses, once you finish the course, you then have to take the AP exam and then score high enough on the AP exam for the schools to accept your score.”
