What Is a Transcript... and How the Heck Do I Get One?
Part 1: Taking the mystery out of the high school transcript.
Editor’s Note: This stack is part 1 of a 4-part series about high school transcripts. You can find the rest of the series here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
If you attend high school anywhere in the United States, it’s only a matter of time before you hear the word “transcript” bandied about. Like many things when it comes to academia, transcripts only reside in the realm of high schools and colleges; they don’t exist anywhere else. (At least not these kinds of transcripts; in the real world, “transcript” usually refers to a word-for-word written record of oral speech.) So it’s not surprising that many students and parents don’t know what transcripts are or how they are used.
A Written Record of a Different Kind
High school (and college) transcripts are a written record — but instead of recording your speech, they record your academic accomplishments: the courses you’ve taken, the grades you earned, and the credit your school awarded you in return. Their most common use is in applying to college. Generally, other types of applications that require you to prove you’re a high school graduate (such as job applications) will ask for your diploma, not your transcript. But schools don’t keep copies of diplomas; the transcript is the formal academic record, and if you ask the school for proof of graduation, that’s the record it will supply.
Official transcripts are only issued by schools. If you attend a public or private school, you can usually request a copy from your guidance counselor’s office or through your school’s learning management system. But if you’re homeschooled, your homeschool is the legal school of record. That means that homeschoolers can and must write and issue their own transcripts.
Sound scary? It’s not, I promise.
How To Make a Homeschool Transcript
Making a transcript as a homeschooler is as simple as picking a template and filling it out. There are services out there that will write the transcript for you, but I don’t recommend these, as they will require you to do most of the legwork yourself anyway, and charge you for the pleasure to boot. The easiest part of making a transcript is actually making the transcript so don’t waste your money paying someone else to do it.
There are dozens of easy-to-use transcript templates out there, and a Google search will turn up plenty of options. Transcripts from public and private schools come in all kinds of formats, so don’t get hung up on needing yours to look a certain way. As long as it’s neat and clean and includes a few basic elements — which we’ll cover in an upcoming post — the format isn’t all that important.
Choose a template that is easy for you to use, in an application you’re familiar with. Now is not the time to learn to use a spreadsheet if you’ve never made one! I like this template for Google Docs (you can download it as a Word doc if you prefer) and used it for my daughter’s transcript, although I made some adjustments to it so that it better suited our needs. NCHE has a free template for Microsoft Excel, and Homeschooling for College Credit has a free tutorial for building your own in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Handwritten transcripts are fine as long as you are keeping them for your own use. But official transcripts, especially those submitted to colleges and filed as part of your school’s permanent record, should always be typed.
Subject vs Yearly
You’ll notice that all of these templates are organized by school year. Many homeschoolers advocate for using a subject-based transcript — i.e., one in which coursework is grouped by subject rather than by year. Since homeschoolers often don’t operate on a traditional school-year calendar, this makes some sense. However, I discourage subject transcripts, especially for college-bound students, for several reasons:
Some colleges flat-out require them. Simple as that.
Public and private schools never use subject-based transcripts. Colleges aren’t used to seeing them, and when your application might only get 10-15 minutes of an admissions counselor’s time, every second counts. The less time she has to spend figuring out how to read your transcript, the better.
Colleges are looking for a couple of key things from your transcript: A. Do you meet their minimum admissions requirements? and B. Does your coursework show increasing rigor and challenge over grades 9-12? You want it to be instantly, irrefutably clear that you’re an absolute yes on both counts.
Like it or not, there is some bias out there. Some colleges adore homeschoolers and some swing the opposite way. The vast majority are neutral! But there’s no need to set yourself up for anti-homeschooling sentiment. You want to stand out on your college application! But this isn’t the way to do it.
Admissions counselors tend to be recent college graduates. Read: they’re most often from the same generation as the student, not the parent. These kids aren’t big on long-form articles. They like short, pithy, and to-the-point. Don’t set yourself up for failure by making them dig for information.
If, after understanding the above, you are adamant that a subject-based transcript truly serves your needs best, by all means, create one. But I urge you to also make one organized by year, just in case. It will be far easier than having to come up with one on short notice if a college demands it.
Next week, we’ll take a look at the three basic elements that make up your transcript: coursework, credits, and grades.
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