The advent of online courses gives a lot of flexibility to high school students who want to take a class that isn’t offered by their high school, that they can’t take because of a scheduling conflict, or that simply piques their interest. But it also frequently leads to the question of whether or not the course will be accepted—and respected—by their high school and/or the colleges they apply to.

I’ve never met anyone who knows more about college admissions than my business partner, Arun Ponnusamy. In addition to reading applications at the University of Chicago, Caltech, and UCLA, he’s also personally counseled hundreds of students into the right colleges for them. Today, he shared this tidbit with our counselors.

The UCs (University of California) require high schools and course providers to submit their syllabi for approval. If an applicant were to submit a grade in a Spanish 4 course that was not approved, as far as the UCs are concerned, that student didn’t take Spanish 4. The UCs list all of those approved courses in a massive online database, and that list includes online courses, which you can search here.

Of course, just because the UCs approve a course doesn’t mean that every other institution will. But the standards for course approval are fairly rigorous, and our counselors consider that if a course is quality enough to be approved by one of the largest and most respected public university systems in the world, there’s a reasonable chance it will be good enough for most high schools and universities. In fact, when Arun needs to help one of his students find a quality online course, this database is the first place he searches. Not all online providers submit their courses to the UCs, but most established ones do.

Here’s how to search for approved online courses:

1. Visit the link: https://hs-articulation.ucop.edu/agcourselist#/list/search/course
2. On the left side, find “By institution type” and check off “School” and “Online Publisher.”
3. Another menu will drop down under “School,” then check “Online” under “By school subtype.”
4. In the tool bar at the top, type in a keyword like “Italian” or “Sign Language” or “Engineering” and you’ll get results. (As with most searches, don’t get too specific—broad searches yield more results.)

Arun did share this caveat: This database only covers online courses specifically geared towards high school students, and there are many colleges teaching courses online that will not be included in these search results.