mailing transcript v. uploading it on School Report

Pre-College Issues Home Schooling and College
1

<p>On the School Report, the maximum size of the transcript that is to be uploaded is 500 KB.</p>

<p>Our homeschool transcript is quite a bit larger than 500 KB because we are including syllabi of all his courses along with booklists, short bios of student's course instructors, and a few letters that he received from our local university according to their policy of sending letters instead of transcripts to show the grades of high schoolers who attend there.</p>

<p>If we decide to mail everything related to our student's transcript, the things listed above, then we would print and bind it at Staples, creating a mini-book of everything.</p>

<p>My question is, if we mail 8 copies of this mini-book to the universities where he is applying, will that work? Will the Admissions Officers at least scan through the book? The official transcript would be the first thing and the remaining pages would be the add'l data to explain the courses he took, etc.</p>

<p>How have the rest of you sent extra materials to support your homeschooling? I know the schools want the extra info (I twice attended a workshop for homeschoolers about applying to college, and AO from Princeton and Rutgers said this repeatedly) but I am unclear the best way to send it.</p>

2

<p>You should definitely upload an abbreviated transcript – don’t skip that part. You can leave out all the syllabuses, teacher bios, course descriptions, etc. Just put the name of the course and the grade if there is one. </p>

<p>Then, in addition, you can send in the paper the booklet you are putting together. Be careful of overkill though. Does your child have any test scores for the subjects --AP scores or SAT Subject Tests? If so, you probably don’t need the full syllabus - just a brief course description would be fine, maybe a list of books used. If a kid has an 750-800 on the SAT World History test, for example, the admisssions officers are not going to spend time on an extensive presentation on their world history studies. If there is nothing standardized or “objective” validating the work, then the supporting material may come into the evaluation more.</p>

<p>It’s hard to say how much time an admissions officer will spend on it. Of course, test scores are given more weight for homeschoolers who’ve learned outside of an institutional setting. Will the college where your son took classes not produce a transcript at all? That’s very odd, but if so, then of course those letters will be necessary.</p>

<p>We sent the Common App transcript – just course names, grades – and then also a supplement with descriptions and books used, but only for the course work that was not taken at the local college, by correspondence, or in some other institutional-type arrangement. I also left off extensive explanation about obvious subjects when there was an SAT Subject test covering that topic. My D had SAT tests in world history, american history, literature, math and latin. I didn’t explain much about those things except to say she studied them and used [title of book/s – the list of titles for lit was long, but the others not so much.]</p>

<p>My son took quire a few classes at the local university (as a high schooler), but they just sent a transcript, so that was easy. All in all, my kids’ applications were part electronic, and then a good bit more on paper. The total page count for the paper stuff was about 5 pages, I think – plus a writing sample requested by one school, that was another 5-6 pages.</p>

3

<p>Thanks 'rentof2! The university where my son has taken 2 courses is Princeton Univ., and their policy for high schoolers is to write a letter stating the grade the student received. He got an A and an A- in those 2 classes, which is an accomplishment due to Princeton’s grading policy, so we are definitely including the letters stating this. And his first choice, which is Princeton, will of course have no problem accepting letters from… themselves LOL. </p>

<p>Meanwhile, he also took 7 courses at a graduate school in our town, and their policy is to only give official transcripts for non-traditional students if they took a course in the summer. Since only 1 of his courses was in the summer, but the other 6 received legitimate grades from the profs, we are including info to explain why there is only 1 course listed on the transcript from this school. </p>

<p>I like your idea of paring down our booklet so that courses he took outside the home (which were more than 50% of his total courses) or courses that were validated by outside test scores or transcripts have less info in the booklet than courses taught and evaluated by the parents. </p>

<p>For our booklet, is there a “best” way to sent this? Print, bind and mail? Send as a PDF attachment in an email to the Admissions Office? What are others’ opinions on that?</p>

4

<p>Definitely print, bind, and mail. That’s what I did for supplementary materials on my homeschool transcript. I would personally leave out the biographies of the course instructors in your transcript. Bear in mind how many transcripts some of these admissions counselors have to read through–you want it to be memorable, not a slog for them.</p>

5

<p>The primary reason for the short teacher bios is to show how many highly-qualified teachers he has had as a homeschooler–7 of his teachers have a PhD, for example. So our feeling was that a brief description of his teachers’ credentials would be worth the space it took up in his transcript booklet. But maybe I’ll go back and shorten it somewhat too. Thanks for that thought Hogwarts!</p>

6

<p>We didn’t bother with the supplemental info since so many of his classes had CC grades, but could you make an “additional transcript” of supplemental info? So upload a Summary transcript and a Supplemental transcript?</p>

7

<p>Is the main benefit of printing, binding and mailing the fact that the booklet is something the AO can hold in their hands and read easily? I myself prefer a real book with pages to turn compared to reading an electronic book, where it is difficult to flip back and forth between chapters.</p>

<p>I have heard some AO say that they convert everything sent by mail into a digital file, so it is possible whatever I send will end up scanned and read on a computer in the end.</p>

8

<p>SmileAMile,</p>

<p>I do remember when my son contacted Princeton (or maybe it was me?) via email, his admissions officer did indicate that, if possible, try not to have documents be so long since they have a lot of applications to look at. I think at the time, his transcripts plus course descriptions were maybe 22-23 pages long. I think I pared them down to 16. I definitely did not include a bio of teachers but I had a little grid for each class that looked sort of like this:</p>

<p>Course: XXXXXX
Year: XXXXX
Grade: XXXX
Location: XXXXX
Teacher: XXXXX </p>

<p>In that way, admissions can see all the high level teachers your son has had just by seeing the “Dr.” in the teacher’s name.</p>