The Basics of Making a High School Transcript

1. Relax. YOU can make a high quality transcript for your child. You do NOT have to hire a professional or join an umbrella school program just to have a professional looking transcript.  A transcript really isn’t difficult to make and YOU can do it.

2. Decide on your standards and requirements for each course. This will include the time (credit hours) necessary, grades (if given), study time, assignments, etc.

3. Give all courses professional sounding names.

For example, in Home Schooling the Highschooler, Volume 2, Diana McAlister and Candice Oneschak list these course names: Pottery, Photography, Drama Production, Orchestra, Nutrition and Fitness, Forestry, Economics. These are just a very few of the course ideas listed.

In The High School Handbook, Mary Schofield lists Calligraphy, Fashion Design, Gourmet Cooking, History of Music, Hiking, Archery, Botany, Creation Science, and Robotics. Again, these are just a tiny sampling of the course titles listed in her book.

4.  Be sure to include extracurricular activities. We gave our son a full credit for Archery/Marksmanship/Bicycling. We could have given more credit for these activities as he spent much time practicing each. If an extracurricular activity meets your standard of requirements for ability, preparation and study, as well as time spent include it as a course. If not, list it as an activity at the bottom of the transcript.

5. Grading. It is not necessarily imperative to use traditional grades on the transcript.

This is the grading scale we used:

A=Mastery of content, B=Comprehension, C=Basic understanding, F=Failure to complete or understand material, P=Pass in a Pass/Fail course

List your grading scale on the transcript if it is non traditional and honestly grade all courses.

 I found this note in the September 2002, issue 30, Part 2 of EASYHOMESCHOOLING ELETTER by Lorraine Curry very helpful:

~~~~~~~   I just thought I would throw in my 2 cents about high school transcripts and GEDs. I did not assign grades on the theory that we did not move on until mastery of a subject had occurred. That means my daughter earned an A in every subject. I thought it better to just not assign grades because I didn't think the admissions offices of colleges would put much weight on those grades anyway. I spoke to a number of them and they confirmed this. We were very upfront about ours being a homeschool.

I also did not assign credit hours because my oldest daughter understands things rather quickly and I didn't want her to have to spend a certain number of hours on a subject for the sake of a transcript.

What I did was to make a transcript listing the subjects she took and awarded one credit for each subject. I made a notation on the bottom that credit was awarded for mastery and mastery was determined by ongoing evaluation. The one admissions official I spoke to after I mailed the transcripts asked me if I had written the transcript. When I told her I had she told me it was very professional looking.

Without grades, my daughter was admitted to 7 colleges. She was offered large scholarships to 6 of them. (Guess which one she's going to! The 7th!) The only one of the 7 that asked for a GED was a Christian college that accepted her to the honors program and offered her a full tuition scholarship. Another Christian college did not ask for a GED and none of the secular ones did, not even one of the most selective state colleges in our state.

The only drawback to not having a GPA and class rank was that it appears she was excluded from the largest scholarships at a few of the colleges. There were a few that listed the SAT score and class rank and/or GPA one needed for a full scholarship. Although she met the SAT requirement, she was not offered the scholarship. We decided not to pursue the issue with them because she decided on another college. She's going to a first tier liberal arts college that offered a large grant. Hope that doesn't sound like bragging, I just wanted to let you know that college admissions record keeping isn't really that hard. Thanks for your newsletter, also loved your first book!

God bless,

Darlene Ryan~~~~~~~

Copyright 2002 Lorraine Curry. Reprinted with permission from Lorraine Curry's EasyHomeschooling Eletter. Visit the EasyHomeschooling web site for FREE Checklists and Articles with Tips and Inspiration,  Author's Biographies, and tools such as Vintage Books and AIM Health Products. http://www.easyhomeschooling.net

~~~~

6. Limit the transcript to 1 or 2 pages. You are writing a brief summary of your child’s high school years not a portfolio. Admissions offices do not have the time (or desire) to read a lengthy, rambling document.

 7. Make them look professional. Transcripts should be compiled on a computer, not handwritten. A special program is not needed. Microsoft Word works really well for transcript making and I am sure most any other word processing program would work just fine.

 A few samples of transcripts can be found at:

Donna Young’s fantastic site http://donnayoung.org/index.htm

“Homeschooling in Texas”, sample transcript (note: I can’t find the web address for their main site, if anyone has it, could you please email me? Thank you!)

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2026/transcrp.html

Again, this is only the basics of making a transcript, for more complete information I suggest you purchase The High School Handbook by Mary Schofield and Home Schooling the Highschooler, Volume 2, by Diana McAlister and Candice Oneschak. I do hope though, you feel a little more confident and realize that YOU are the professional in charge of your child’s education and are certainly qualified and capable of preparing a high school transcript.

~Penni