Can Narrative Home School Transcripts be Acceptable
One of the most important jobs in homeschooling high school is creating your student’s homeschooling transcript. Sometimes I get questions on how important it is to have a typical looking transcript with grades, credits and a GPA vs. a more narrative type of transcript, or even one with courses listed but no grades.
Perhaps it could help if you thought about it a little differently. Whenever you are preparing transcripts, think about yourself as a foreign language translator. Your job is to translate your homeschooling into words and numbers that colleges will understand. Your job is not to alter your homeschooling – you have to do what works for you and your student. You job is only to translate your experiences (whatever they are) into the “love language” of colleges.
I know several colleges don’t mind a narrative explanation of a homeschooling. I visited a Christian college fair and there were a couple of colleges where 15-20% of their student body had been homeschooling. Those admissions people talked about narrative records in a very warm and open way. This weekend I visited a Homeschooling College Fair, and these colleges were just as agreeable to all sorts of homeschooling records (or else they most likely wouldn’t be at a fair just for homeschooling, right? )#) However I think the majority of colleges may not understand anything other than a traditional transcript since it will seem like a foreign language to them.
You might want to group your student’s learning experiences together into groups that are about 1 credit worth. Label it something that sounds like a class title. When he has put in a year’s worth of math work, for example, you could call it “Discrete Math, ” “Concepts in Math” or something similar. You could take a look at CLEP exams, and see which ones look like academic content that your student has learned, and then list those subject names on your transcript. Check out Barb Shelton’s Homeschooling Form-U-La book. It’s not for everyone, but she has a good explanation of how to take what you have accomplished and explaining it in college-friendly language.