Transcripts

I've been away to a family wedding and tacked on a vacation while we were at it! Back home now and ready to blog about homeschooling and other education topics! Any questions or comments, please post them!

Transcripts. The dreaded transcripts. Colleges need to see them and public and private high schools provide them but as a homeschooling family YOU are required to write one up. The transcript needs to be SIMPLE and easy to read. Don't worry about your grading rubric or how many hours each "course" took or each test and quiz. That is TOO much information! The college wants to see three things: course name, grade and your signature at the bottom of the transcript. Easy as pie!

A simple transcript will have ALL of the coursework for the high school years including online classes and dual enrollment. This way the college admissions folks can see all of it at once without having to flip through pages of college and online high school transcripts. I can only say what I did and it worked great for us and many of my friends.

First, set up a table in Microsoft Word or any other word processing program. This table will have the student's full name, SSI, date of issue and total GPA information. I used a two-column format at the top of the page. I called it Swithers Family Home School or something like that at the very top as a title. Below the first small, two-column table I made another table where the courses are located. Because my daughter did some high school classes while in 8th grade I have 6 columns in this table. Column one is for the course, two is for grade 8, three for grade 9 etc.

Fill in the larger table with the coursework in chronological order. Colleges are looking for course - grade, that's it! Write the course in the first column and then place the grade under the proper grade level column. If your student took a course at an online high school, list it in chronological order and then indicate, maybe with an asterisk, that there is something unique to this course. Under the larger table place the asterisk and then indicate what it means.

For example:

Biology* B
Freshman Composition** A

* indicates a class taken through the Florida Virtual School
** indicates a class taken at Valencia Community College

I needed both one asterisk and two asterisk notations for both the FLVS and dual enrollment.

At the end, write out:

Transcript Issued By - and then sign your name.

Florida State was not going to accept my daughter's transcript, and pull her from her classes, because I didn't sign ours. We sent a signed copy and all was well!

That's it! As an unschooling family I tried to group what my kids did into courses so I could have a transcript that made sense. Don't lie on the transcript. Please. If you wrote down that your child took Trigonometry but he didn't, and then the college uses that course as a prerequisite for another class, maybe Physics, then your kid will be out in the cold! He will not be able to do the work required. Be honest. It only hurts your kids when the transcript is not true.

If your student took courses at a college please have those transcripts sent to the university as well. Any college coursework requires a transcript in order to transfer the credit to the new college or university. I can email a sample transcript with the format if you need it! This was given to me by someone else, so I can't take credit for it! I know many people who used this and their kids are in college and many of them have already graduated, mine included!