What Are A-G and CC Courses? What Parents Need to Know for High School Planning
Last Tuesday, I sat at my kitchen table, half a cold iced coffee sweating next to my work laptop, sorting through the crumpled course selection sheet my 10th grader dumped there after school. Goldfish crackers were scattered across the laminate, our golden retriever was nose-deep in a crumb pile, and my daughter leaned against the fridge saying, “Counselor said I’m missing one A-G credit, and do I need to sign up for a CC course this summer? I don’t know what any of this means.”
I didn’t either. I grew up in Ohio, where high school course requirements were just “get enough credits to graduate” and I’d never heard the terms A-G or CC thrown around. When I texted a group chat of other local parents, three out of four replied with the same thing: “Wait, what’s a CC course in this context?” The fourth, whose kid is a senior graduating this year, replied with a single eye-roll emoji and “I can help, I just spent three months fixing this mess.”
I got on the school website first, but the page explaining requirements was three paragraphs of jargon that made my eyes glaze over. So I booked a meeting with my daughter’s counselor, Ms. Lopez, who I already knew keeps a jar of mini peppermints on her desk and doesn’t talk to kids like they’re toddlers. We met after school last week, her office cramped with stacked file folders and student art taped to the wall, and she broke it down plain, no fancy words.
A-G, she explained, is just the set of course requirements the University of California and California State University systems use to check if you’re eligible to apply. The requirements are split into seven subject areas, labeled A through G – that’s where the name comes from. You need a certain number of years in each, and you have to get at least a C or higher in each course that counts. The big catch most people miss is that not every course your high school offers counts. The school has to get each course approved by UC to be on the A-G list, and that list changes every year. That was our problem right there: my daughter wanted to count her creative writing elective for her English (the B requirement) credit, but the school never got that course approved, so it didn’t count toward the total. That left us with a missing credit we didn’t know we had.
As for CC, that’s shorthand for concurrent enrollment around here – taking courses at the local community college while you’re still in high school. Some places call it dual enrollment, but CC is what everyone uses in our district. A lot of parents and kids see it as an easy way to catch up on a missing A-G credit or get an extra requirement done early, which it is – but only if that specific community college course is also A-G approved. That’s the second common gotcha. We were already looking at a low-cost intro psychology CC course for this summer to make up our missing credit, and if we’d signed up without checking, we would’ve wasted $50 and a whole summer, because that specific course isn’t on the approved list.
Ms. Lopez said she sees this mistake at least once a week. Parents assume all community college courses automatically count, but they don’t. Each course has to be approved individually, just like high school courses.
From that meeting, we walked away with a handful of simple steps that I wish someone had told me about a year earlier. First, pull up your high school’s A-G approved course list before you pick any classes, every single year. Don’t just assume the course you want is approved because it was approved when your neighbor’s kid took it two years ago. My kid’s school dropped AP Environmental Science from the approved list this year, so any sophomore who signed up for it thinking it would count for lab science credit has to swap it now. Second, if you’re looking at a CC course, pull up the UC A-G course search portal online before you sign up. You just type in your community college’s name, search the course number, and it tells you right away if it’s approved for which A-G subject. That takes two minutes, and it saves you so much trouble. Third, book your meeting with your counselor at least a week before course selection opens, not the day before. Ms. Lopez said she has time to go through every credit and answer all questions if you book early, but if you just show up during lunch on deadline day, you get five minutes and you’re almost guaranteed to miss something.
I used to think A-G only mattered for kids applying straight to a UC or CSU right after high school. Ms. Lopez corrected that too. If your kid plans to go to community college first then transfer to a UC, they still need all A-G requirements done to be eligible for transfer. Most private colleges and out-of-state public schools also use A-G as a baseline to judge your course load, even if they don’t require it explicitly. It’s also not the same as graduation requirements: our district lets you graduate with fewer credits than A-G requires, so you can walk across the stage on time and still not be eligible for any four-year public school in the state. That’s a huge surprise for a lot of senior parents.
We ended up swapping my daughter’s creative writing elective for the school’s approved journalism course this semester, which still lets her write, it just counts for A-G. She’s doing the creative writing workshop as an after-school club, so she doesn’t have to give it up entirely. We also found an A-G approved intro sociology CC course at our local community college for this summer, that will cover the extra requirement we need for junior year. It all worked out this time, but it was a lot closer than I would’ve liked.
Just last weekend, I ran into another mom at the grocery store who told me her son graduated last year, and he found out two weeks before graduation that he was missing one A-G credit. He had to cram an online summer course, and he almost lost his spot at Cal State Long Beach because the approval was late. She said no one ever told her to check the requirements before senior year, so she just assumed everything was fine.
I set a recurring reminder in my phone for the second week of January every year, which is right before our district’s course selection opens. It just says “Check A-G credits, confirm CC approval if needed.” That’s it. I don’t do a long review, just 15 minutes with my daughter and her course sheet, and we cross check everything. I still worry I’ll miss something next year, when she’s a senior and applications are due. There’s a lot of hidden fine print in this whole process that they don’t send home in a simple email. But this little check has kept us from messing up so far, and that’s more than I had when I started staring at that crumpled course sheet on my kitchen table.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Are A-G and CC Courses