How many hours is a homeschool high school credit?

The question comes up in the spring before ninth grade: how do I know my teenager has earned a credit? Schools answer it with seat time and a calendar. At home there is no bell, so you need a rule of your own, written down and applied consistently.

Where the hour figures come from

The Carnegie unit, used by many American high schools for more than a century, is based on contact time with a teacher over a year, commonly given as about 120 hours. Homeschool families often use a range of roughly 120 to 180 hours because work at home includes reading, writing and projects that a school would set as homework.

Three common ways to assign credit

• By hours: log time and award one credit around your chosen threshold. Good for electives, labs and interest-led courses.
• By completion: finishing a full-year high school textbook or program counts as one credit. Simple for core courses.
• By outside measure: a community college course, an online class or a co-op class that states its own credit value.

Half credits and odd courses

A one-semester course is commonly half a credit. Courses that are much shorter can be combined (for example, several short units in health or economics into one half-credit course) or listed as they are. Whatever you do, say so in the course description.

Keeping the numbers

In Homeschool Up each high school course is a subject with a credit value and a description. Recorded lessons add their minutes to the course's area, so if you assign credit by hours the total is already there, and the transcript prints credits, grades and a credit-weighted GPA.