5 Elements Homeschoolers must have on their High School Transcripts
by Michelle Kretzschmar
www.diycollegerankings.com
As a homeschooling parent, you are responsible for creating a high school transcript
to use for college applications.
This is no cause to panic.
Why? Because there is no such thing as a standard transcript form even among school districts.
Try this, do an image search on "high school transcripts samples" in Google.
Take a look at the wide variety of fake transcripts offered for "novelty"
purposes. There is no such thing as a "correct" transcript.
Homeschoolers are usually caught
unprepared when the need for a transcript first arises. Not because
they don't expect their kids to go to college but because it will come
up as a requirement for a summer program or dual credit application.
All of a sudden, they have to produce a transcript when they thought
the entire process would be a year off or even more.
But as I said earlier, there is no need to
panic. There are plenty of examples of homeschool transcripts
available on the web for you to model yours on. Furthermore, you can
keep them pretty simple. As far as I can tell, the must have elements
for a transcript are:
-
Title:
You can use whatever name you want for your homeschool or not, the
important phrase is "Official High School Transcript."
-
Student
Information: name, gender, birthdate, and address.
Social Security number is expected but for those with concerns you
can include some sort of statement like "number provided on
acceptance" or whatever condition you want. Just remember, you are
going to have to provide the number as part of the financial aid
application so the school will get it one way or another. Parental
information is also expected and most transcripts include SAT,
ACT, and other relevant test scores. Schools generally will not
accept these scores as official for homeschoolers; just consider
it a very useful convenience for the admissions staff.
-
Courses
taken: notice, you do not have to list them by
grade level and you don't even have to provide a grade. It's
common for unschoolers to just provide a list of courses (topics)
that the student covered by category, ie math, history, science,
etc. Even many non-unschoolers (not sure that's a word, but you
know what I mean) only include grades given by outside sources,
usually community colleges or distance education classes.
-
Official
Signature: You need to have a line for your
signature as the "Official" whatever of your homeschool. I found
"Official Primary Signature" worked find for us.
-
Graduation Date: If the school doesn't recognize
the student as a senior, they may require a different application
process.
As you can see, these requirements aren't that
demanding. Of course, there are other aspects of the transcript that
you need to consider depending on the purpose of the transcript. The
one that probably causes the greatest anxiety are grades and gpa. Many
homeschoolers are reluctant to put "mommy grades" on the transcript
because they think they won't be taken seriously or think that they
have to have some sort of outside evidence to back them up. You can
leave out mommy grades and your student can still be admitted into the most selective
schools in the country.
Scholarships
There are two issues to consider. The
first is merit scholarships. In many cases, if you don't have a gpa,
you aren't eligible for merit scholarships. Again, there are
homeschoolers who get merit scholarships based on work in a portfolio
and never provide a gpa. Other scholarships are based just on SAT/ACT
scores.
But you are still taking a risk and think
of it this way. What's the worst that can happen if you do put your
own grades on the transcript? Worst case scenario is that the
admissions' officer becomes annoyed with you for having to go through
and remove all of the grades and decide to reject the application. But
hardly likely. I have yet to hear of homeschoolers being punished for
listing their own grades. Consult with the school and then do what you're
comfortable with.
Athletics
There is a case where you must enter
grades and in chronological order. If your student is intending to
compete in Division I or II college athletics, the NCAA requires
grades to be assigned to each course so that they can calculate a gpa
for qualification purposes. If you do not assign a grade, they will
assign a "D" for you. Furthermore, it is in your best interest to use
course titles that are listed as acceptable core courses on the NCAA
website. You may have done a study of Japanese literature but you put
it down on the transcript as "English 11." If college athletics are a
possibility, visit the
NCAA
Eligibility Center early to make sure you meet all the
requirements.
Grade Point Average
GPA is probably the area most ripe for
convoluted calculations and general anxiety. The first concern is
grade scale. It's a good idea to put your grade scale on the
transcript. You'll see something like "A 90-100 4.0" and
then down the scale. Many schools use pluses and minuses and so they
list their numerical equivalents as well. And then there is the
weighting of grades with honor points for taking honors, advanced
placement, or International Baccalaureate classes. This allows for a B
in an advanced placement class to have the same weight as an A in a
regular class which is how students end up with gpas over 4.0.
As a homeschooler, you can choose to
weight classes to indicate difficulty and use any grading scale you
want to as long as you indicate what is an A,B,C etc. The question is,
should you?
It's generally believed that most colleges
recalculate the gpa according to their own standards. It makes sense
for them to strip the weighting and calculate a straight gpa and then
create some sort of system to indicate the difficulty of the course
work. Many will also only use what they consider "core" classes in
these calculations. So why go through the agony of weighting classes
when it's not going to be used? It's easier to just calculate a
straight gpa and indicate which classes were honors or college level.
This can be complicated if the student has
outside grades that are based on a more elaborate scale that includes
minuses and pluses. However, since the admissions people are likely to
turn the A- into an A, there is no reason why you can't do the same on
your transcript while sending an original transcript from the
community college separately.
Regardless of the form you chose for your
transcript, it you are calculating gpa start with it on a spreadsheet.
This will help to minimize mistakes in calculating gpa for the school
year and the cumulative gpa. You can also double check your
information by using one of the many gpa calculators available online.
Credits
If you are calculating a gpa, you are
going to need to report credits. In general, people give one credit
for a course that covers the entire school year. There are some
homeschoolers who insist on assigning credits based on
Carnegie Units
where one unit equals 120 hours of time spent on the subject. After
sitting through a State Board of Education meeting discussing the
number of minutes to require for elementary reading, I'm not a big fan
of the system. I suspect that most college admissions expect the
amount of time a homeschooler spends a subject to vary widely to
account for different speeds of mastery. In other words, I suggest you
give a full years credit for Algebra 2 even if the student finishes it
in three months. Now, if it's an issue of the student taking two years
to complete what is generally expected to be a one year class, that's
another problem.
Course Origins
It's also a good idea for homeschoolers to
indicate the source of the class, whether it was a community college
class, taken online, etc. Not only does this indicate the outside
source of validation that so many homeschoolers are worried about but
also indicates successful socialization skills in the classroom that
so many non-homeschoolers worry about. This can be done with footnotes
or as part of the course title.
Extracurricular Activities
Some transcripts include a space to enter
extracurricular activities. I don't see the point unless you don't
have any other place to include this information as part of your
admissions application.
Attendance
I've seen a few transcript examples that
include attendance. To me this is more of a report card category and
only of interest to states that require homeschoolers to report
attendance. If the organization isn't requesting it, I wouldn't
include it.
Transcript Examples from Colleges
Some colleges have examples of high school
transcripts for homeschoolers including
Baylor
University,
Mary
Baldwin College,
East Tennessee
State University,
Liberty
University,
Convenant College,
Bethel
College (includes Excel form),
Wheaton College,
NCAA, and the
Common Application. Looking at these examples should reassure you
that there is not one correct way to do a transcript. Many colleges,
while not providing a transcript example, will list what information
they want to see on the transcript including
University of Washington,
Indiana Wesleyan University,
Houghton College, and
Lewis & Clark.
Course Descriptions
It's important to distinguish between
transcripts and course descriptions because the colleges won't always
to it. Many descriptions sound as if they want the textbook and
syllabi listed on the transcript. Unless you are doing a very short
course description or just listing textbooks used as required by the
NCAA, it's easier for all involved to have your course descriptions
separate from the transcript. You might include the course description
as part of the transcript document where the transcript is the first
page in a traditionally expected format and the following pages
contain the course descriptions. Consider the transcript the overview
of the course descriptions.
It's not difficult to find a variety of
sample transcripts by doing a simple web search. You can also buy
software or web services that will create a transcript based on
information you enter. Some simply generate the transcript while
others are part of a comprehensive grade book program. You may find
them useful.
However, I hope after reviewing some of
the examples I talked about here, you realize that this isn't
something to panic about. I have a link to the two transcripts we used
for my son. The first
transcript I put together rather quickly so that he could
apply for a dual credit program at the community college. I realize
now that I didn't include a grading scale. He got in anyway. The
community college did require that I have transcript notarized.
The
second transcript is the one we used
for his college applications. All the colleges my son applied to with
the exception of one, used the Common Application. I created a file
that included the transcript, course description, and reading list
which I uploaded as the transcript file. He was accepted at all of the
schools he applied to.
If you're interested in learning more
about the college search process, visit
www.diycollegerankings.com.
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