Can Narrative Home School Transcripts Be Alright?

By Author: Robert Browns
Total Articles: 1
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Among the biggest tasks in home schooling high school is making your student's home school transcript. Quite often I receive questions on how necessary it is to have a standard looking transcript with grades, credits and a GPA vs. a more narrative style of transcript, or even one with classes mentioned yet no grades.

Maybe it could help if you thought about this a bit differently. Whenever you are preparing transcripts, think about yourself as a foreign language translator. Your task will be to translate your homeschool into words and numbers that colleges will recognize. Your job isn't to alter your home school - you have to do what works for you as well as your student. You job is simply to translate your experiences (no matter what they are) to the "love language" of colleges.

I understand several colleges will not mind a narrative description of a home school. I visited a Christian college fair and there were a couple of colleges where 15-20% of their student body had been home schooled. Those admissions people spoke of narrative records in a rather comfortable and receptive manner. This weekend I visited a ...
... Home school College Fair, and these colleges were just as agreeable to quite a few home school records (or else they most likely would not be at a fair only for home schoolers, right? )#) However I believe that the majority of colleges will not recognize anything except for a typical transcript since it will feel like a foreign language to them.

You might choose to cluster your student's learning experiences together in groups that are about one credit worth. Name it something that sounds like a class title. When he has put in a year's worth of math work, for instance, you could name it "Discrete Math, " "Concepts in Math" or something equivalent. You could take a look at CLEP exams, and see which ones look like academic content that your student has learned, then record those subject names on your transcript. Take a look at Barb Shelton's Homeschool Form-U-La book. It is not for everyone, yet she has a good description of ways to take what you have accomplished and explaining it in college-friendly language.

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