How to Get Grade 11 Physics Credit After Starting Post-Secondary: A Parent’s Guide
It was 9 p.m. mid-October, crumbs of leftover pepperoni pizza scattered across our kitchen table, when my 19-year-old daughter Lila dropped her laptop hard enough to make her coffee mug jump. The screen glowed with an email from her university program advisor. For three months, she’d been talking about switching from general arts to kinesiology—she’d been working part-time at a physical therapy clinic, loved helping clients work through injuries, and wanted to pursue sports rehab. The email ended with one line that stopped us cold: Applicants must have completed Grade 11 physics for admission. Lila had dropped science after Grade 10 to fit more studio art classes into her schedule, and never looked back.
“I messed up the whole thing,” she said, pushing a crust around her plate. “I have to quit university and go back to high school, don’t I?”
We spent the next two hours scrolling through conflicting forum posts, half claiming you can only earn high school credits while you’re still enrolled in high school, the other half pushing overpriced private programs that promised instant credit. I called my cousin, a high school guidance counselor, the next morning, and over the next four months we worked through the process step by step. It turned out to be far simpler and cheaper than we expected that first night.
The first thing we learned that no random online comment made clear: always confirm what your post-secondary institution actually accepts before you pay for anything. We wrote back to Lila’s advisor, asking for a written breakdown of prerequisite requirements, not just a one-line note saying you need Grade 11 physics. Turned out they didn’t require the credit to come from a specific public high school—they just needed proof of accredited coursework covering core topics: kinematics, Newton’s laws, energy, waves, and a practical lab component. That opened up way more options than we’d initially thought.
From there, we sorted through the available options to find what fit Lila’s schedule. Night school through the local public high school was the first suggestion we saw, but Lila was already living two hours away at university, taking four first-year classes and working 12 hours a week at a campus barista job, so that wasn’t feasible. We ended up comparing three flexible options: online high school through the provincial public distance learning portal, challenge exams through the provincial education authority, and prerequisite courses at the local community college.
Challenge exams let you study on your own time and just write the final exam to earn the credit, which works well for people who already have a background in physics. But Lila hadn’t touched any physics in three years, so she didn’t feel confident skipping the structured coursework. Community college pre-requisite courses were an option, but they cost more than 10 times what a public high school course cost, and would have added extra unneeded credits to her university transcript, so we ruled that out. We landed on the online Grade 11 physics course through the public distance learning portal, for a total cost of $52 plus $25 for a required lab kit. That was a far cry from the $350 private online courses that popped up first in our search results.
The biggest mistake we almost made was registering before getting pre-approval. Right before we paid the fee, we sent the full course outline and lab description to Lila’s advisor, and got a written confirmation that it met all requirements. This is a step so many people skip, and I’ve heard from three other parents in the last year whose kids wasted hundreds of dollars on unaccredited courses that their university refused to accept. We also almost missed checking the lab requirement: a lot of cheap online courses cut costs by dropping the practical lab component, but almost all high school physics credits require it, and most post-secondary programs won’t accept a credit without it. Lila’s course sent a small kit with a marble, a spring scale, a ruler, and other basic supplies, and she did four simple experiments at home after her weekly modules, submitting her lab reports online with no in-person requirement needed.
Lila fit the course into her schedule by doing two to three hours of work a week, after classes and on slow shifts at the café. It took her four months to finish, which put her final grade in right before the registration deadline for the kinesiology stream. She got a 78% on the final exam, the board sent her transcript directly to the university, and it was accepted with no pushback. We didn’t have to take a semester off, we didn’t pay thousands of dollars, and she didn’t have to move back home to restart high school.
It’s easy to panic when you get that news, right? When your kid is already settled in post-secondary and suddenly finds out they’re missing one small high school credit for the program they actually want. Everyone acts like it’s a huge disaster that will set them back a full year, but more often than not, there’s a flexible, low-cost option that works around their current commitments. The only hard rules we found hold are: get written pre-approval from your post-secondary program before you pay for any course, confirm the course is accredited by your regional education authority, and double check that it includes the required lab component. If you or your kid already have a working knowledge of physics, ask if a challenge exam is an option—it cuts out the coursework and gets you the credit for a fraction of the cost.
Lila started her kinesiology courses this fall. She still complains about mandatory Friday lab sessions, and she’s still not sure if she wants to apply to grad school when she graduates. No part of this process was perfectly smooth, and there were a few late nights where she texted me saying she was ready to give up and stick with general arts. But it worked out, far easier than we expected that October night at the kitchen table. It’s not the end of your kid’s plan when they’re missing a credit—it’s just one extra small step to get where they want to go.
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