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A student must have a minimum of 14 core Carnegie unit credits, including completion of Algebra II, and a minimum 3.0 GPA.

Andrew Carnegie first established the modern-day credit hour in the early 1900s, allowing colleges to participate in a free pension system if they adopted the use of a “standard unit,” also known as a “Carnegie unit,” for college admissions.

The proposal would move the District away from a system based solely on the age-old “Carnegie unit,” which grants credit according to seat time, in favor of a system that rewards how much a student knows or can do.

Nearly every aspect of school life – from the academic calendar to college admission requirements and financial aid eligibility – are governed by the Carnegie Unit, or credit hour, a decades-old gauge of college readiness.

The foundation, which created the Carnegie Unit more than 100 years ago, stressed it was never meant to measure student learning, but rather to distinguish basic requirements for college-level work from high school academics at a time when the majority of the population never finished high school.