The Four Critical Components of Your Transcript
Transcript How-To, Part 2: A transcript's not a transcript without these four things.
Editor’s Note: This stack is part 2 of a 4-part series about high school transcripts. You can find the rest of the series here: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4
Last week, we talked about high school transcripts: what they are and how to get them. You can find that article here. Primarily, I focused on transcripts for homeschoolers, because if you’re a public- or private-schooled student, your school will provide the transcript for you. Your biggest responsibility is taking the right courses to make you a competitive college applicant and ensuring that your school reports your academic record accurately. I suggest requesting a copy of your transcript at the beginning of each school year and checking it for errors. You can do this through your school’s guidance office or learning management system.
Remember that a transcript must be issued by a school. While some colleges will allow you to self-report your coursework and grades on the initial application (this is known as the Self-Reported Academic Record, or SRAR), eventually you’re going to be required to submit an official transcript, and it must come directly from your school.
If you’re homeschooled it’s a bit murkier, since you are the school. Or rather, the adult in charge of your education is the school. In some states, there may be a third party, such as a charter or umbrella school, that issues the transcript, but most of the time it will come directly from the homeschool itself. It’s important that you think of your homeschool as a legal entity with the authority and responsibility to keep official records. The transcript is the penultimate legal homeschool record.
I talked last week about how to organize your transcript, including some templates you can use to make the process easier. You can find that info here. Now I want to take a look at the critical components that make up the meat of your transcript: Coursework, credits, grades, and GPA. Effective transcripts will include all four of these parts.
Coursework: Document What You Learned
The point of the transcript is to serve as your academic record for grades 9-12. So it makes sense that the first component is a list of the coursework you’ve completed. Each academic year will show the classes that you took during that year. (Some homeschoolers prefer organizing their transcripts by subject instead of year, but I strongly advise against that for reasons I outlined in the previous post.)
Each course needs to have a title. It’s usually best to keep this simple but specific: “Geometry,” “Chemistry,” “World History.” If your coursework was very unique and you want to highlight that, it might be best to give a more detailed title. My daughter took courses in Asian literature and creative nonfiction for her English credits, so we used those titles rather than the more generic “English I” and “English IV.”
If you’ve completed honors-level or AP® coursework, include those designations in the course title: “Honors Algebra 1,” “AP® Human Geography.” Remember that AP® is a registered trademark of the College Board and it is unethical to use that designation unless you have completed an officially sanctioned AP® course.
For dual enrollment courses, I recommend using the same title as the college, including its alphanumeric (the letters and numbers that accompany the title, such as ENG-101). Use a footnote to indicate the name of the institution at which the course was taken.
You do not have to list courses in any particular order, but it can be helpful to try to keep subjects in the same order each year. For example, if you start 9th grade with your English class, followed by math, then science, it may help to do the same in grades 10-12. This can make it easier for admissions counselors to quickly scan.
Most public and private schools will not classify courses by subject within each academic year. In other words, you don’t have to label a course as English or science or an elective. If you’re using more descriptive course titles, however, this may be a good idea, as it will help colleges determine whether or not you’ve met their minimum admissions requirements.
Credit: Document How Much Time You Spent
The term “credit” refers to the time spent and the amount of material covered in each course. A good rule of thumb is that one full credit equals approximately 120 hours of work. If you complete a curriculum that the publisher or provider labels as worth one high school credit, that also can count.
In most states, a full credit is documented as 1.0. However, in a few places, a full credit might equal 2.0 or even 5.0. You have the option of following what your local schools do, but the simplest method is count each full credit as 1. You can also award partial credit for courses that are shorter or cover less material; quarter increments (0.25, 0.5) are the most common. You can also give more than a full credit if warranted, but this is less common. Consider whether it makes sense to break courses of more than one credit into multiple classes.
You should show the number of credits earned at the end of each academic year, as well as a cumulative total, on your transcript.
Grades: Document How You Performed
Grading in your homeschool could warrant an entire post in itself. There are multiple ways that a homeschooling parent can choose to assess their student’s performance — too many to get into here. But I do want to give you a couple of key points:
Be consistent. Whatever means of assessment you choose, use it consistently throughout the course, and across courses of a similar nature.
Don’t be afraid of giving A’s when they are earned. Many homeschoolers require that work be repeated until mastery is demonstrated because we are more interested in learning than in grades. But an A is shorthand for mastery. If your student has mastered a topic, it’s entirely appropriate to give a grade of A. Do not be concerned that your “mommy grades” are less valid than grades from a traditional school. Just make sure that you are grading fairly and with integrity.
Do not give pass/fail grades. Homeschoolers are often tempted to give pass/fail grades because it seems so much easier than awarding a numeric or letter grade. Please don’t! Colleges use grades and GPA to compare applicants, and they will not hesitate to calculate a GPA for your student if you don’t. And most often, they will interpret pass/fail grades as middle-of-the-road — in other words, a C. If you really want to tank your student’s GPA, issuing pass/fail grades is a surefire way to do it.
If possible include both letter and numeric grades. Sometimes this is possible, sometimes it isn’t, due to a variety of factors. But this advice goes along with #3 above. Colleges will often recalculate each student’s GPA according to a proprietary algorithm that factors in the college’s priorities. Sometimes this recalculated GPA is used for admissions purposes, sometimes it’s used for scholarships. Either way, giving more information about how well you performed in a given class can sometimes result in boosting your application.
GPA: Document How You Compare
GPA, or Grade Point Average, is an average of your grades, which schools use to compare students by their performance. Each course is assigned a certain number of quality points based on the grade: A=4.0 quality points, B=3.0, and so on. GPA calculation takes into account the grade earned, but also the amount of credit the course was worth and the type of course (such as honors, AP, or dual enrollment). This can be tricky, so it’s often easiest to use a GPA calculator like this one.
Your transcript should show a GPA for each academic year, as well as a cumulative GPA for grades 9-12. It should also include a grading scale showing the numeric grades that correspond with each letter.
Weighted Vs. Unweighted?
This is a question that plagues many homeschoolers: Should I weight the GPA? Weighting refers to the practice of awarding extra quality points for courses that are more difficult. While the weighting scale is your decision, it is most common to weight honors courses +0.5 quality points and AP or dual enrollment +1.0. A grade of A in an honors course would thus be worth 4.5 quality points, and an A in an AP or dual enrollment course would be worth 5.0.
You should always report an unweighted GPA. If you also decide to weight the GPA, you should include a footnote explaining your weighting system.
Now that you’ve crafted a transcript, what do you do with it? We’ll cover that next week.
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