How to Get Grade 11 Physics Credit After Starting Post-Secondary: What We Learned
The mug of lukewarm peppermint tea was sweating on my kitchen table when Luka slid his laptop across to me last November. He’d just finished his first midterm season at the local community college, where he’d enrolled in general science after high school, planning to major in biology. That week, he’d realized he actually wanted to switch to mechanical engineering, and had emailed the program advisor at the nearby university to ask about prerequisites. The advisor’s one-line reply stopped us both: You need a Grade 11 physics credit for admission. Luka’d dropped physics in 11th grade to fit in two extra computer science classes, never imagining he’d need it later. By that point, he was already three months into post-secondary, with a dorm room sorted and a part-time barista shift that covered his gas and groceries. He slouched back in his chair and said, “Great, do I have to redo a whole year of high school now?”
We spent the next three hours that night googling, and came away more confused than we started. Some forums said you had to re-enroll in high school full-time to get the credit. Others said random online crash courses counted, no questions asked. One parent shared that her kid had spent $1,000 on a prep course that the university refused to accept, so they had to start over. I texted my cousin who works in high school guidance, and she told us the first rule: never sign up for anything before you confirm what your target program will actually take.
Luka called the university admissions office directly the next day, instead of just replying to the generic advisor email. He got a hold of an admissions officer who specialized in transfer students, and she spelled it out clearly: any accredited Grade 11 physics credit from the provincial Ministry of Education would work, in-person or online. She even wrote that confirmation in an email, so we had it on file. She also mentioned that this is way more common than people think – a huge number of students switch majors or career goals after starting post-secondary, and end up missing a high school prerequisite they never thought they’d need.
We started sorting through options after that call. First up was local public school board night school. The cost was only $40 for adult learners, which was a steal, but classes were two nights a week from 7 to 10 pm. Luka already had college classes on Monday and Wednesday, and barista shifts on Saturday morning, so adding two nights would have meant he had no time left to study for his college midterms and finals. We crossed that option off the list pretty quickly.
Next came accredited online high schools. The Ministry of Education has a public list of all approved schools on their website, which we downloaded. The admissions officer had warned us to avoid any school that wasn’t on that list, because unaccredited schools don’t issue credits that count for university admission. Luka almost signed up for a $199 course that popped up first on Google, but when we checked the list, it wasn’t there. That would have been a total waste of time and money.
We ended up picking an approved online school that offered self-paced learning. The cost was $340, which was way cheaper than any college-level equivalent course we saw. The school let him start the same day he registered, and he just needed to send in a copy of his old high school transcript to prove he had Grade 10 science, the prerequisite for Grade 11 physics. His old high school had an online transcript request form that took 5 minutes to fill out, and they sent it over in two days.
Luka set a simple rule for himself: do one hour of physics every weekday right after his last college lecture, before his evening shift. The course had 12 units and 4 required labs. The school mailed him a cheap lab kit with a spring scale, a ruler, a small pendulum, and a manual for at-home experiments. I walked through the living room one Tuesday night and found him sprawled on the rug, throwing a tennis ball across the room and timing it with his phone, muttering about calculating acceleration due to gravity. He complained a lot about having to do extra work on top of his college classes, but he never fell behind. It took him four and a half months to finish the whole course, which put him done a month before the engineering application deadline.
What surprised both of us was how flexible the whole process was, once we cut through the bad information online. Most people assume you have to put your post-secondary studies on hold to get a missing high school credit, but that’s just not true. Luka finished his first year of community college with a 3.7 GPA, kept his barista job, and got his Grade 11 physics credit all at the same time.
The other thing no one tells you is to check if your current post-secondary school will give you any transfer credit for the high school course. Luka needed a one-credit general science elective to finish his general science associate degree, and the community college accepted the Grade 11 physics credit to cover that requirement. That knocked out one extra class he would have had to take this semester, which saved him almost $600 in tuition.
The only near-mistake we made was not asking about the lab requirement upfront for the first online course we considered. That school required all students to do two in-person labs at their main campus, two hours away from where Luka lived, which would have been impossible to fit in. After that, we always asked that simple question first: can labs be done at home, and is that acceptable to my target university? It’s a small check that saves a ton of hassle.
Luka got his acceptance to the mechanical engineering program last month, and he’s starting in the fall. He still hasn’t sorted out his new off-campus housing, and he’s stressing about how hard first-year engineering classes will be. Doing the extra physics credit wasn’t fun, and he says he wouldn’t recommend planning to do it this way if you can avoid it. But for kids who switch majors after starting post-secondary, or who didn’t know what they wanted to do when they were 16, it’s totally doable. You don’t have to drop out, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars, you just have to check the requirements first and pick an option that fits around your existing schedule. Right now, he’s spending his summer working extra shifts to save for tuition, and the credit is just done, tucked away in his transcript, one less thing to worry about.
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