Revised 06/2003

Process for Assigning Carnegie Units

This guideline is designed to help ESs determine appropriate units to award based on a student’s work. This guide has been designed to allow for the maximum amount of flexibility available within educationally sound parameters. Assigning units is determined by a combination of course content, student ability, and time spent in the learning process. When awarding Carnegie units, the ES also considers the following: If this body of work were to be studied in a traditional classroom setting, would it warrant the amount of Carnegie units being awarded?

Included in this document are criteria for college-bound, general, and basic courses, as well as non-textbook specific courses.

College-Bound, General, and Basic courses

IEM schools award five (5) units for a semester's worth of course work. Assigning units depends on what the student learns, not how long the student spends at learning. Five (5) units of credit are not to be confused with a semester's length of time. A student can complete five units of course work before the end of the semester or may earn a full year’s credit (10 units) during one semester. Some published curricula count their semester course work at 1/2 unit while others use another measure. We expect students to cover and master the educational material in order to earn the Carnegie units.

We award traditional Carnegie units to our students. Traditional high schools loosely consider 12 to 15 hours of seat time equal to a Carnegie unit. We do not consider seat time when calculating units. We do consider the amount of material covered and learned.

Units for "college prep" courses are generally awarded in either 5 unit or 10 unit increments. These courses will not require that the student/parent track hours.

The ES can use time as a method of measuring units earned. This can occur if a student is studying a body of work that does not conform to a standard high school text. This will be discussed further under the topic of non-"text book specific" course and grades criteria.

The Education Specialist will identify how many units to assign once the assignments are completed. The ES determines the amount of credit assigned, not the parent. The following are examples of units currently being given:

If the student is taking a college course, use the high school standards to determine the number of units to be assigned.

Non-"Textbook Specific" Course and Grades

Occasionally you will be serving a parent who enjoys creating his or her own course content. It is possible for a student to learn the same amount of material without depending on a traditional text and this is a perfectly acceptable manner in which to award units. However, this model requires a different approach in the planning stages. It is important to keep our standards high when working outside the parameters of a published course of study. The course content and verification procedure must be discussed fully before determining units to be assigned. At minimum, there must be a general listing of the topics to be covered, as well as a discussion of the projects and activities to be used in the learning of the topics. The criteria for earning units in this situation may be based on the number of hours the student spends learning. Units could be awarded according to the number of hours logged on the Class Completion Check-Off Sheet.

 

-A student may retake a course to improve his/her grade. The ES should record the course again in the learning record. The ES should give the appropriate grade and credits for the repeated course. The credits for the course, although taken twice, can only count once toward graduation. In order to exclude the first grade from the GPA, the ES should contact their ES advisor indicating the student number, semester and year, and course number, asking to exclude the course from the GPA calculation.