Carnigie Unit Definition

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17 September 2002

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Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 15:43:04 EDT

Sender: Headmasters List at International Schools <HEAD-NET@TC.UMN.EDU>

From: John Aldrich Sly <SJohnaldrichsly@CS.COM>

Subject: Re: Fw: question - Carnegie unit

This may be MUCH more than you want to know about a Carnegie Unit. I always thought of it as one of the high school courses needed to enter college. You know, "You need four Carnegie Units of English, three of History &c. "to get into college.'"

The following is a bit much. I "cut & pasted", Bill; even for you I would not copy that stuff.

Cheers, john Sly

A measurement of classroom attendance at the secondary school level. One

unit represents one hour per day each academic year, or between 180 to 190

hours of classroom contact".

James S. Frey (President of Educational Credential Evaluators, Inc., provides a longer definition:

Technically, there is no such thing as a "Carnegie Unit". Early in the 20th

Century, a commission funded by Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy met to set

standards for the measurement and reporting of secondary education in the

United States. One of the recommendations of the commission was to

standardize the reporting of the quantity of secondary school work by

assigning one unit of value to a subject taught one hour per day, five days

per week, for one academic year. Generically, this has been known as an

"annual unit of high school work". Some people, referring to the source of

the commission which made this recommendation, referred to the unit as a

"Carnegie unit", to the commission's dismay. In spite of the commission's objections, the name "Carnegie unit" has survived in colloquial speech and occasionally in writing.

The "annual unit of high school work" is the most common quantitative

reporting measure in the United States. It is not the only one. A number of

secondary schools use a "semester unit" to record a subject taught one hour

per day, five days per week, for one semester (one-half year). Some secondary

schools use a "semester hour unit" to record a subject taught one hour per

week for one semester.

These three systems relate to each other as follows:

* 1 annual unit = 2 semester units = 10 semester hour units

It should be noted that the annual unit (and the other two types of

quantitative record keeping) hides a number of variations in secondary school

curricula:

1. The "hour" might be 60, 55, 50, 45, or 40 minutes long.

2. The academic year might be 36, 37, 38, 39, or 40 weeks long.

In the United States, variations in the length of a class "hour" and in the

length of an academic year are ignored when curricula from two or more

institutions are compared.

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