Special Circumstances and the High School Transcript
Transcript How-To, Part 4: Credits earned before grade 9, graduating early, and what to do about your "super senior"
Editor’s Note: This article is the final installment of my Transcript How-To series. If you missed the previous articles, you can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Transcripts are generally straightforward. But there are a few situations that may require making adjustments to the transcript in order to paint the clearest picture of your high school experience. If you attend a traditional school, your school will decide how it wants to handle these special circumstances, although if any of them apply to you, I recommend asking some questions so you know how your educational experience will be reflected on your transcript and what that will tell colleges about you. Homeschoolers, read on for my suggestions!
Pre-High School Credits
It’s not uncommon for students to take a few high school credits before they begin 9th grade, and in the case of homeschoolers, some students rack up a full year’s worth of credits or even more. There are a couple of options for documenting these credits on the transcript. But first, let’s talk about how colleges view pre-high school credits.
Colleges vary in their stance on credit earned prior to 9th grade. Most will not penalize you for early credits, but neither will they reward you. Some colleges are picky about accepting coursework done before high school to meet their minimum admissions requirements, especially in disciplines such as English and history that do not have well-defined criteria as to what constitutes a high school-level course. Classes such as math and foreign language are usually safer bets, especially if you use them to get a jump start so that you can drill deeper into the subject (taking five years of foreign language instead of four, for example) and not just to get them out of the way.
So you may choose to leave pre-high school credits off the transcript altogether. After all, if you take algebra 2, trigonometry, and calculus in high school, the college can safely assume that you passed algebra 1 first.
If you do wish to include the credits, you have a couple of options. You can list them under 9th grade, with a footnote that indicates them as pre-high school credits. This works best if you have only a handful of classes to list. If you have quite a few, it may be easier to create a separate section of the transcript just for coursework completed prior to 9th grade.
Most schools will not count pre-high school credits in the GPA, so it is my recommendation that you don’t either. They should, however, be included in the cumulative credit count.
Homeschoolers often get defensive about credits earned prior to high school and will sometimes argue that the credit should be included because the student earned it. But ultimately you need to think about your intended audience. If you’re applying to college, that’s admissions counselors. Including every class little Johnny took in 6th grade — even if they were all truly done at the high school level — isn’t impressive to outsiders. It looks like padding. Just because you can give credit for it doesn’t mean you should.
You should always challenge your student at their level! My daughter was certainly capable of high school work in middle school, and by 9th grade we were using college textbooks. But unless your student plans to graduate a year or more ahead of schedule, there is more than enough time to earn high school credits in grades 9-12. Showcase the work you do over those four years — that’s what colleges care about anyway.
Graduating Early or Taking a Super Senior Year
I’ve lumped these scenarios together because they require a similar approach and thought process. Homeschoolers love to tailor their educational plans to the specific individual, which means a lot of homeschoolers graduate with fewer or more than four years of high school.
In either scenario, you can choose to translate your experience into the traditional four-year calendar. For the early graduate, that may mean calling your 8th grade year 9th grade, calling 9th grade 10th, and so on. For the so-called “Super Senior,” it would mean the opposite: backing up each grade level so that the original 9th grade becomes 8th grade and falls off the transcript, so to speak. If you choose this route but have credits from the original 9th grade that need to be reflected on the transcript (such as courses specifically required for admission), you can follow the same procedure outlined above for pre-high school credits.
Alternatively, you may choose to adapt your transcript to reflect the actual number of years spent in high school. For the early graduate, that would mean only three academic years; for the Super Senior it would mean five. Neither of these circumstances is wildly uncommon, so I wouldn’t be terribly concerned that they would negatively affect your chances for admission. But I would personally gravitate towards using the four-year transcript if at all possible, simply because it is less work for the admissions officer to interpret.
As a homeschooler, grade placement is under your authority, as is the decision to issue credit and determine what does and does not constitute a high school-level course. So you have the freedom to reclassify your student and your coursework as needed. But please use your freedom for good and not evil, making ethical and truthful choices. Not only does failure to do so put your student at a disadvantage in college preparedness, it reflects poorly on all homeschoolers.
So that’s the lowdown on transcripts! What questions do you have? Drop them in the comments below or reach out to me directly!
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