close
window
Why Keep Transcript
Records?
It is important to keep good records of your child's homeschooled
years. Transcripts are generally kept for a high school age student, though
you can keep transcripts
for elementary school students as well. This page is intended to outline
high school transcripts for homeschoolers.
Transcripts or Portfolio?
The first thing you have to decide is is if you
will keep transcript or portfolio records. Discuss this with your student.
A portfolio generally consists of descriptions and examples of the student’s
work and accomplishments. It also includes, programs, articles, photos,
letters of recommendation. As we are are eclectic
homeschoolers, we decided
to keep a kind of hybrid file that contained transcript records and a
portfolio like collection of samples, should we need it.We
decided that this hybrid kind of file would help college admissions officers
to understand the uniqueness of the student applying.
Transcripts
are just one element of the student profile. It is the high level
overview of the work completed in High School. The other element of the
student profile is the Course
names document.
Read more about the
Course
Names document
document and Student Profile here.
|
Transcripts
Transcripts, most likely will be required for college entrance.
There is no right way or wrong to generate a transcript record,
though a good rule of thumb is that transcript counts the number
of hours spent or "seat time" on a subject. The idea of
"seat time comes to us courtesy of the public schools and can
be useful to college administrators if you are keeping transcripts
in a way that is familiar and can be used to compare "apples
to apples" at college admission time. One standard is the Carnegie
Credit granting system which lists 120 to 150 hours of
seat time on a subject. Realistically though, if you are the administrator
keeping track, it really doesn't matter how many hours, as long
as the subject has been mastered and you are honest and consistent
in awarding credit hours. |
Elements of a Transcript
Transcripts basically contain
the date it was generated, the student's social security number, the name
and address of the school, a tally of credit hours and descriptions of
completed or in-progress courses, the student's GPA (grade point average).
It also will describe how you arrived at your numbers for credit hours
and GPA.
I
keep yearly transcripts and a cumulative transcript.
Measuring
Your Student's Work, or Standards
While my student was still enrolled in a school, one teacher had a method
of measuring students using cutesy little symbols. Many of my students
papers had a box-like symbol that had a face on it at the top of them.
After about 5 of these papers, mind you this was first grade, I went to
the teacher and asked what this thing was. I was told it was "Mr.
Box" and Mr. Box meant very good work. I asked why couldn't the paper
just have an A or a B, apparently that was harmful to children's self
esteem.
I
am very opposed to standardized testing, and I don't believe that standardized
testing adequately measures student ability, but at some point, you do
have to quantify the work that your student is producing. You can quantify
it, or your student can quantify it, but you need some kind of idea what
the caliber of work is to help determine where your student might apply
to college. If your student does not feel he is doing the heavy hitting
work an Ivy league may expect, perhaps he ends up looking at another kind
of school. Regardless, a measuring stick of some kind we found is beneficial.It
is also going to matter if you are going to generate transcripts.
In
general, people seem to understand two methods for measuring. The Percentage
System and Letter Grading System. Again, we use a hybrid of these two
things. Places like Math where answers can be right or wrong are good
places to use The Percentage System, Composition is a good place to use
a Letter Grade System. If you map Letter Grades to the The Percentage
System, you have a good start to calculating a GPA. (grade point average).
The
Letter System
The Letter System seems to come in two flavors, the traditional
:
A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-C+, C, C-
and
O- Outstanding, E - Excellent, VG - Very Good, G - Good, S
- Satisfactory, N - Needs Improvement.
One way to map one to the other is
O =A+, A = E, A- =VG , B+ = G , B =S, N = C
The
Percentage System
The Percentage system is based on the idea that the best you
can do is 100%. To calculate a percent, you take the total
number of the incorrect items and divide by the total number
of items and then subtract that number from 100%.
(98%-+100%), (97%-94%), (93%-90%) (89%-86%), (85%-82%), (81%-78%)
(77%-74%), (73%-70%)
Once
you have a percentage you can map it to the traditional letter
grade:
Letter Grades A+ (98%-+100%), A (97%-94%), A-(93%-90%) B+(89%-86%),
B(85%-82%), B-(81%-78%) C+(77%-74%), C (73%-70%)
The
Grade Point System
In the grade point system, all letter grades are converted
to a grade equivalent based on the 4.0 system.Your grade point
average may range from 0.0 to a 4.3 and is based on using
the traditional letter system:
A+= 4.3, A=4.0, A-=3.67 B+=3.33, B=3.0, B-=2.67, C+=2.33,
C=2.0 C-=1.67
The
Grade Point System - Honors or "Weighted" Scale
Because Honors and AP classes are more difficult classes,
the grades earned in Honors and AP courses at most schools
are given an extra grade point. With the honors scale:
A = 5 points, B = 4 points, and C = 3 points.
Therefore,
when these grade points are averaged with your regular grades,
your overall GPA could be higher than 4.0 and your GPA is
a "Weighted GPA". |
|
|
Calculating
Credit Hours and Grade Point Average
You calculate the credit hours based on the number of hours spent on a
subject. A common measure for a credit hour is 120 hours on a topic. For
example if your student reads Modern Literature for 1 hour 3 times a week
(1 x 3 = 3 hours a week) and your school year is 40 weeks (3 x 40=120
total hours), you can grant your student 1 credit hour in English Literature,
for the year.
You calculate GPA using your credit hour numbers. Typically, if you assigned
a grade of "A" to a course that is 1 credit hour, that course
earns 4 grade points. If you have 2 credit hour course where you assigned
a grade of "A", the student earns 8 grade points. You do this
for each course completed. Once you have assigned grade points to all
courses, you total those points and divide by the number of credit hours
to get the average or GPA.
Total
Credit Hours 14
Total Grade Points 53.10
GPA 3.79
GPA
= Total Grade Points / Total Credit Hours
3.79 = 53.10 / 14
See an example
(PDF) |
Sample
Transcript Forms |
|
Cumulative
Example(1) Transcript (As Seen Below) [PDF] |
|
Cumulative
transcript Example(2) [PDF] |
|
High
School Transcipt Example(3) (.xls)
(This is the one I started with. |
Our
Transcript Forms |
|
Our
Elementary School Cumulative transcript (example
- .pdf) |
|
Our
Elementary School Cumulative transcript blank (.doc) |
|
Our
High School transcript - Blank (.xls)(.pdf) |
See all of our free
downloads here.
See all of our information about homeshooling
teens here.
Review our course of study and the resources we used here.
|