Hi, I’m currently homeschooled junior, but planning to enroll in my local public school for my senior year. I’ve been wondering about how this would translate on my college applications. For example, would I still have to apply according to the homeschool or public school guidelines? I have an organized transcript of my current classes (mostly textboooks and online resources) and grades. Would they still need a portfolio of my homeschool work?
My prospective schools are: Cornell, Ohio State and several other schools. I also plan to take the SAT in June.
You will likely need to follow the homeschool application route- UNLESS your high school is going to put your courses/grades from 9-11 on the high school transcript. I doubt they will since you’re only there for 1 year.
Hopefully your parents kept really good records and portfolios. Good luck!
Colleges are different. I’d be prepared to submit a homeschool transcript in addition to one from the public school.
My son is a homeschool graduate. No colleges asked for a portfolio. I submitted a school profile with information about our community, a description of courses and list of resources/texts, and our education philosophy and grading policy. It was 35 pages long. I made sure he had letters of recommendation from people who had reviewed his work and I carefully selected the work they reviewed. One was an experiment/research related to Kepler’s Law with several pages of handwritten math calculations. The woman who wrote the LOR included a copy of the work she reviewed.
Find out how your public school handles homeschool transcripts. In our state, homeschool families submit report cards to the public school every year so the public school might include a copy when they send theirs to colleges, but I wouldn’t count on it. I think a family that homeschooled for part of high school would have to send their own. I’d encourage doing so anyway. Three years is a lot of work, and I wouldn’t leave it to the high school to explain it. Those grades, even if your school will report them, need some sort of background information. Without it, colleges are left to interpret them however they want.