How do I calculate Credit Hours?
I am working on my child's transcript and am confused about calculating credit hours.
I understand that Carnegie Credits are typically used by schools and are calculated by counting classroom time. I also have heard that depending on the difficulty of the class, more or less credits are offered. How have people worked that out for their homeschoolers?
In addition to our yearlong subjects, we have also spent quite a bit of time doing various unit studies. How should we calculate those?
Are there any books or websites that people would recommend to help?
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Some might wonder at the reason for assigning credit hours for a homeschooler, but I think that it makes sense for us to use the same language in our transcripts that traditional students do. American high schools give 1 credit for yearlong classes meeting every school day, approximately 120 hours. This is a standard time measure that indicates the length of the class and the number of hours dedicated to it, so in terms of making it easier to understand how our student has spent his or her time, it's very useful.
Since some of our "classes" have lasted for longer than one calendar year and some less, I've decided to use 150 hours as a standard credit measure. I have defined this on the transcript, so when readers see "Music Theory - .25 credits" they know it means the student spent at least 37.5 hours working on the class. You can think of that as being an hour a day, five days a week for eight weeks, or an hour and 15 minutes every week during the school year.
