How to Get Grade 11 Physics Credit After Starting Post-Secondary: A Parent’s Practical Guide
The kitchen clock ticked 8:17 last October when my 19-year-old son Sam dropped his backpack onto the table next to my pile of folded laundry and said, “I messed up. I can’t get into engineering next year.”
At 16, Sam had been dead set on studying business. He swapped his mandatory Grade 11 physics slot for a full-year high school co-op placement at a local accounting firm, and we all thought that was a great call. He got into a general first-year program at our local university, aced his intro to business classes, and then halfway through the first semester, he took an introductory engineering elective on a whim. By the end of the course, he’d changed his mind entirely – he wanted to major in mechanical engineering. The only catch? The program required Grade 11 physics as a prerequisite, no exceptions, even for students already in post-secondary with 12 university credits under their belt.
We’d never heard of getting a high school credit after starting university, so our first move was a call to the program’s admissions advisor. It turned out this is way more common than we thought. Hundreds of students change their education plans after high school, and most post-secondary schools are used to this. You don’t have to drop out, reapply to high school, or take a year off to get the credit you need – you just need an accredited credit from an approved provider.
We started sorting through options. First, we checked local continuing education, which offers night classes for high school credits at public high schools. It was cheap, only $320 for the full course, but it ran 6:30 to 9:30 two nights a week, and Sam’s uni labs were scheduled for exactly those nights. That wasn’t going to work. Next, Sam found a cheap online school advertised on social media that offered fast Grade 11 credits for $250, no labs required. We almost signed up right there, but I remembered the advisor’s warning: most unaccredited private schools don’t count, and any course without a lab component will be rejected. We checked the university’s public list of approved credit providers, and that cheap school wasn’t on it. We dodged a bullet there – hundreds of students waste money every year on credits that don’t count.
We ended up going with a provincially accredited online high school that was on the university’s approved list. The course cost $520, plus $80 for an at-home lab kit that got shipped to our house in three business days. The biggest perk was the flexible pacing: we could choose any timeline between 30 days and 12 months to finish. Sam was taking four university courses plus working 15 hours a week at a campus coffee shop, so we opted for five months. That let him do an hour or two of work most weeknights between classes and shifts, and save the hands-on labs for Sunday afternoons when he came home to stay for the weekend.
I still have the water stain on my canvas kitchen placemat from the first pendulum lab he did, where he knocked over a beaker half full of water. He complained the whole time about typos in the lab manual, but he ended up enjoying it more than he expected. He said it was way easier to grasp the concepts now than it would have been when he was 16 – he already had first-year calculus under his belt, so all the number work that trips up high school students made immediate sense to him.
We also looked at other options that didn’t work for us but might work for other families. Local community colleges often offer introductory physics courses that count as equivalent to Grade 11 for most university programs. That’s a good pick if your student struggles with self-directed online learning and prefers in-person classes. It was more expensive, around $900, and the scheduling didn’t work for Sam, but it’s a solid alternative. Some public school boards also let post-secondary students take single high school courses during the day, but that’s only really useful if your student is taking a gap year and has an open schedule.
From our experience, the first concrete step any parent or student should take is to send a quick two-sentence email to your program’s admissions advisor: name the credit you need, name the provider you’re considering, and ask explicitly if the credit will be accepted. It takes 48 hours to get a reply, and it saves you so much time and money. Second, always confirm the course includes the required number of lab hours. Almost every engineering and science program requires a hands-on lab component for Grade 11 physics, so skip any course that cuts that corner. Third, don’t let anyone pressure you into cramming the course into a month to hit an application deadline. If you need an extra semester to finish while balancing your post-secondary course load, it’s better to wait a term to apply than to rush and get a bad grade or burn out.
Sam finished the course three weeks ago, got a B+, and the online school sent his official transcript directly to admissions just like we asked. We’re still waiting to hear back on his fall application. Last night he texted me a photo of himself at the campus engineering open house, standing in front of the robotics lab grinning with a free program sticker on his hoodie. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s a whole lot further along than we were that October night when he sat at my kitchen table convinced he’d ruined his plans. It’s confusing to figure out at first, because all the guidance out there is for high school students, but once you check the fine print and pick the right option for your schedule, it’s way simpler than it looks.
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