Dual Credit Courses and The Challenges Students Have Transitioning to A Community College
Introduction

Tobolowsky and Allen (2016) posits that dual credit courses refer to courses that high school students can take where they get to earn both high school and college credit simultaneously. The students will not have to take any standardized test in order for them to earn credits. Dual credit courses have been found to be beneficial to the students in that they can take up to 2 years of introductory college courses and this works towards them joining the college with vital credits. It has also been found that dual credit courses allow high school students to easily transition to college (Lile, Ottusch, Jones, & Richards, 2018). It has been noted that students who are the first to join college from their families face numerous challenges enrolling and succeeding in college. Students who come from minority groups or come, low-income families, are also faced with the same challenges. It is for this reason that the dual credit courses were introduced not only for the top performing students but for all students. This increased the likelihood of students joining college regardless of the backgrounds (Jones, 2014). The challenges faced were reduced and there has been an increased number of high school students who transition to college. Dual credit courses are affordable and reduce the cost of college education for a student (Jones, 2014; Lile et al., 2018; Tobolowsky & Allen, 2016). While the benefits of dual credit courses are noble and have been confirmed by numerous researchers, it is disappointing to note that there are still challenges that students face when they are transitioning to community college. These challenges will be covered in our literature review.

Literature Review

The quality of instruction has been in question ever since the dual credit courses begun. A majority of the secondary educators that also teach advanced placement courses have noted some concerns with the quality of instruction they offer. According to (Lile et al., 2018) college professors have also noted that dual credit courses do not offer the same level of rigor that is required of college students. This means that the students would still suffer and struggle to keep up with the realities of college. This goes against the intention of dual credit courses, which is to prepare students for the rigor and realities of college. The lack of this means that students will still have a hard time transitioning from high school to college (Jones, 2014). The only difference is that the students will have...…to be prepared for when they will join college fully.

Conclusion

There are many advantages that high school students get when they undertake dual credit courses and these advantages are being pushed by the proponents of dual credit courses. While it is true that dual credit courses are beneficial to students, there are some challenges that students are faced with and some of these challenges have not been fully analyzed in research. Therefore, there is need to take a different approach to analyze the efficacy of dual credit courses with an aim to uncover the underlying challenges as having been noted in the literature review. Students who only undertake the courses within their high school will have a hard time transitioning to college because they will not be prepared for college life and only prepared academically. Students whose credits are refused by their preferred college are likely to not further their postsecondary education or they are forced to undertake the same course again. This demonstrates the lack of standardization on the offerings of dual credit courses that should be looked into to ensure that no institution would reject a student’s credits. Standardization would also benefit the students since they would be encouraged to pursue courses that would assist them complete college faster and at a…