AP-aligned courses. Built around your child.

How we teach and grade it

Each lesson is a reading built around your teen's interests, with short checks along the way and a Reading Check at the end. The mentor stays beside every reading and project: it answers questions about any passage your teen highlights, notices when they seem stuck and offers help, explains an idea another way after a wrong answer, and can draw a diagram on its board. During a Reading Check it can clarify what a question is asking without giving the answer away.

We grade everything your child submits as soon as they submit it, so grading never lands on you. When your child gets something wrong, we help them work through it, and projects come back with feedback they can revise from. Every grade and its feedback is saved to your teen's record as they go.

Science courses include a lab sequence with instructions and analysis questions. Your teen writes up each lab, and the write-up is graded the same way an essay is. Your family supplies the equipment, a safe workspace, and an adult present for hands-on work.

Taking the AP exam as a homeschooler

Enrolling in a course does not register your teen for the AP exam. College Board gives its exams through schools, so a homeschooled student tests at a local school that offers them. That school's AP coordinator orders the exam, collects the fee, and tells your teen where and when to report.

Timing matters more than anything else here. Schools send their exam orders to College Board by mid-November, and each school sets its own deadline and rules for outside students, so the school needs to hear from you early in the fall. College Board's AP Course Ledger lists the schools that offer each subject, and the AP coordinator at a nearby one can say whether it is taking homeschooled students this year. Exams are given over two weeks in May, and scores come out in July on a 1 to 5 scale.

Courses scored by portfolio or class project

The three art courses, 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and Drawing, have no sit-down exam. Your teen submits a digital portfolio through AP Digital Portfolio by College Board's May deadline, with access arranged by an AP coordinator. Sustained Investigation, a body of work around one question with written evidence of the process, is 60% of the score; Selected Works is 40%. Our art courses keep every trial, critique, revision, and finished piece together, so the portfolio is built as the course goes.

AP Seminar and AP Research scores require a teacher-led class at a participating school; College Board does not allow independent study for either. Our capstone courses teach the same research and argument skills, and the official score needs that class. AP Computer Science Principles adds the Create performance task to its exam, and AP African American Studies adds an individual student project, both arranged through an AP coordinator.

On the transcript and for college credit

An advanced course goes on the transcript we generate like any other course, with its credits and grade, and the weighted GPA counts it one point higher, the way schools weight AP classes. Credits come from the hours we estimate from the lessons your teen completed, at 120 hours a credit.

College Board reserves the AP name for courses it has approved through its AP Course Audit, so our courses carry Advanced titles. The exam score is separate from our grade: College Board reports it, and each college decides from its own policy whether a score earns credit, placement, or both.