Arizona Ged
Would "campus atmosphere" mean that the school feels more like a university?
what on earth is a "high school equivalency
test"?
as I now suspect, it is so common in American suburbs
and rural areas for high schools to have "campuses". I had no idea that
they did until a few years ago I saw the film _Romy and
Michelle's High School Reunion_, where there's a reference to an Arizona
high school's 'campus', and after that I started to notice lots of high
school-related references to the word 'campus'. It *couldn't* have been a
traditional (pre-Eisenhower, say) usage -- could it have? To me it seems
quite preposterous. The high schools I grew up knowing had a large school
building, a schoolyard, and maybe some athletic grounds and buildings,
none of which even comes close to establishing a "campus". The only thing
really different I see in suburban and rural public high schools is that
they might have some nice landscaping and newer buildings, but otherwise I
don't see what creates the "campus". Private schools, particularly
boarding schools, which actually do look like prototypical colleges,
with the equivalent of residence halls, are a whole nother story; I
can see speaking of them having a 'campus'.
This one is standard. That's what Freck is trying to coach students to
take (= UK+ "help pupils cram for"?). Tony Cooper has provided the
appropriate cultural background. Typically an American high school ends
at 'twelfth grade', for 17-18 year olds, but it is also common for
students to leave school earlier than that, before receiving a high school
diploma. (The age at which one can legally stop attended school varies by
state, but I think 16 is common today, and I think it's rare, perhaps even
nonexistent, for it to be higher than that.) I'm not sure how long this
usage has been around, given that if you go back just far enough you'll
find that more people didn't finish high school than did (I *assume*
this is no longer true -- or is it?) but someone who does not complete
high school is called a 'dropout'. The GED exam was devised to enable
dropouts to get the equivalent of a high school diploma without having
actually to go back to high school. It supposedly tests people on the
knowledge they should have had as a result of graduating from high school.