What's a UC honors course?

Every school page here shows two numbers side by side, how many AP courses a school teaches and how many UC-approved honors courses. The first is familiar. The second is a University of California term, and it's the one that lets you compare a school teaching thirty APs with one teaching none.

Where the designation comes from

Every California high school files a course list with the University of California. It's called the A-G list, and it decides which of the school's courses count toward UC and CSU admission. Within that list a school can ask UC to designate individual courses as honors.

UC's conditions are specific. A course has to be built for tenth grade or later, for students who have already done the foundation work, with real prerequisites and a comprehensive final exam or a substantial culminating project. It also has to carry the workload of an AP, IB or introductory college course in the same subject. The school proposes; UC decides.

That review is the whole value of the number. An honors course on a school's own website is a name the school chose. A UC-approved honors course is one an outside body agreed was honors-level work.

Why the counts run from one to a hundred

UC sets no limit on how many honors courses a school may have approved, and schools use that freedom differently.

The schools that dropped AP built their advanced curriculum themselves and put it through this review. Nueva files 107 honors courses, International 92, Castilleja 52. Public schools designate far fewer of their own, most of them in single digits.

So a large honors count tells you a school has put a lot of its own teaching in front of an outside reviewer. A small one at an AP-heavy school usually means the school is meeting that need a different way. Reading either number as a ranking will mislead you.

What it's worth to a student

In the GPA UC calculates for California applicants, each semester of a UC honors course adds one grade point, for grades of A, B or C. The ceiling is eight points across tenth and eleventh grade combined, and no more than four of those can come from tenth grade. AP, IB Higher Level and transferable college courses count toward the same eight.

Against that ceiling, a student at a school filing 107 honors courses and one at a school filing eight reach the same maximum. What differs is how much choice they have along the way.

Applying from outside California changes the math. For the 3.4 GPA minimum that applies to nonresidents, UC weights AP and IB courses only and gives no extra point for a school's own honors courses. They still get read in the campus review, but they no longer add points.

What to ask on a tour

The count is on our pages because it's the one measure of advanced coursework that means the same thing at every school, and because the schools without APs deserved a number of their own. It still can't tell you whether the courses are good, or whether your student will get into them.

Ask who gets placed into the honors sections, and how that's decided. Ask what happens to a student who wants one and isn't placed. A school with fifty approved honors courses and a placement process that admits few students is offering less than the number suggests.