High School Roadmap: plan all four years before the choices are made for you
High School Roadmap turns a school's handbook, course catalog and graduation rules into a planner you can actually use. Drag in classes year by year, and see right away which prerequisites, grade cutoffs and requirements each choice depends on, and what it unlocks on the way to college.
Why I built it
This site was built by a very frustrated high schooler's mom.
My son loves engineering. He can spend ten hours straight in his robotics lab on mechanical and electronic parts, and his team competes at the top of high school VEX robotics. To be a competitive engineering applicant, he needs the classes that show it: calculus, and physics that uses calculus.
At the start of sophomore year, I sat down to figure out which classes he should take to meet his school's rules, carry real rigor, and stay competitive for college applications. That's when I learned that his math sequence had effectively been set by a placement test the spring before freshman year. Summer courses couldn't move him ahead. Outside courses couldn't count as prerequisites. Studying for an AP exam on his own would have closed the next course in the chain. Following the rules exactly as written, he would finish calculus too late to take AP Physics C at his school, no matter how hard he worked from then on.
None of this was hidden. It was spread across a student handbook, a counseling handbook, a scheduling presentation and an online catalog. The answers I got by email from different people were each reasonable, and sometimes they didn't match. Everyone was kind and busy. Nobody had the whole map in one place, and I didn't either until it was nearly too late.
I wish I had seen the whole four-year map at the start of freshman year. This is the tool I wish I'd had.
So I put the rules into a planner. If it helps one family see the dead end before they reach it, it was worth building.
What it does
- Plan by grade. Drag classes into 9th–12th grade, semester by semester, including summers.
- See the dependencies. Arrows connect each course to its prerequisites. Green means the path works, amber means it depends on a grade you haven't earned yet ("needs ≥ B"), and red shows exactly what's missing.
- Check graduation requirements. See credits and semesters by area, and the Honors/AP limits for each year.
- Find the path. Pick a goal course, such as AP Physics C, and see whether any sequence still reaches it by 12th grade, and what that sequence requires.
- Include outside options. UC Scout and FlexPoint Virtual School catalogs, with your school's rules on how outside courses do and don't count.
- Bring it to the counselor. Export the plan to Excel or PDF.
What it is (and isn't)
High School Roadmap is an independent planning tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by any school, and it doesn't replace your school counselor. Schools update their courses and policies, and a document can be read more than one way. Use this site to arrive at your counselor meeting with the right questions and a plan that already respects the written rules, and always confirm the final plan with your school.
Where the rules come from
Every course, prerequisite, grade cutoff and policy comes from the school's own published documents: the student handbook, the college counseling handbook, scheduling materials and the online course catalog. Each one shows its source and page, and every school shows the date its catalog was last checked. Where the documents are silent or unclear, the planner says so instead of guessing.
The first school is Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California. More schools will follow, and you can request yours from the home page.
Free and Pro
The class builder runs entirely in your browser and is free, with no account needed. Features that need our servers or ongoing research are part of Pro and need a sign-in:
- AI answers with handbook citations
- Plan reviews
- Plans saved across devices
- Alerts when a school's rules change
- The Summer & Research Opportunities index, which we keep building over time
Pro is how we keep the data current. See the home page for details.