A little background … In a prior post I shared that my now freshman DD will be spending a year abroad in France next year with the Rotary Youth Exchange. She will attend a local high school and take classes in the local language. She does not know the local language (she is on first year french) and to assume that she will continue to get straight A’s is in my opinion overly optimistic.
She will have enough high school credits to graduate with her class without counting any of these foreign classes. Until Sunday I thought that we would not report any of these grades on her high school transcript nor would these grades be reported to colleges. On Sunday we met with a couple of different colleges at a mini-college type fair and all of the admissions directors said that all classes taken after entering high school need to reported. They were all consistent that the French transcript will need to be included with her records. There are apparently a couple of different services that will translate and convert international grades to US grading scale and US course equivalents (France grades on a 1 - 20 scale with 20 being perfect).
Here is the question … Has anyone gone through this? There is apparently an option to get these grades listed on a high school transcript which varies from having them included in the GPA. Frankly, I think that including these grades in any high school GPA would not be beneficial for my DD nor is it particularly fair but I am at this point uncertain.
On a similar note, there are apparently at least 3 different translation Companies and it costs about $250 to have the transcripts translated. Can I hire all three, look at the results and then pick the best one?
Sorry for the long post but DD is a very strong student (UW 4.0 in all honors and an AP course) and will be looking at elite colleges. I know that this year will allow her to continue to grow as a person but I don’t want it to disadvantage her such that she does not get a fair look from a college. If she has a 4.0UW GPA in her three years of US high school and a 2.0 in France, she will only have a 3.5 UW GPA. Add onto this the weighting of honors / AP courses that she will not take and the GPA will take a huge hit. I would think that admissions officers would be savvy enough to understand this, however in today’s age of computers, I worry that her application might be sorted by a computer program at an elite school and never see any human eye’s.
Seriously, I wouldn't worry top much about this. The benefits of a year in France at a French school will far outweigh any effect on her US transcript, even in the worst case.
See if you can get an agreement from her US school not to take the grades into account for GPA purposes, coming as they will from an entirely different grading system and culture, and from instruction in another language that she will not know that well. I don't know how bureaucratic the school is, but this seems like a no-brainer if anyone has authority to do it. It would absolutely be ridiculous to set up the system to punish people for doing things that have clear educational value.
More important than either of the first two: She should do as much as she possible can to accelerate her French this year. I took my 10th grade year abroad, too, although all of the other people in my program were 11th and 12th graders. There was a huge difference between people who came with only a year of the language and people who came with a stronger background. People who were still beginners in the local language found the whole experience really challenging, and they struggled all the time. People who were a little bit stronger were also challenged initially, but it was much easier to get over the challenges, and many of them achieved near-fluency without some kind of enormous effort.
I agree 100% with JHS. You won’t want the French transcript incorporated in the local high school GPA, but no college is going to worry about less than stellar grades from a kid who is taking classes in a foreign language. I also 100% agree about trying to get some extra French in before she goes. If she’s got the summer, she could perhaps sign up for a community college class or find a tutor. I spent a year in France after four years of studying French in high school and that was challenging enough! (I attended a language institute not a French high school, and lived with a French family.)
My recollection of French grading was that 12 or 13 out of 17 was perfectly acceptable, and I don’t think I ever wrote a compostion that got more than 17 or 18 points. You wouldn’t want someone to think that 12/20 is the same thing as a 60/100.
My D studied in Spain for a semester. Her guidance counselor at our school here looked at her grades from Spain and translated them to a 0-100 scale (our school uses that instead of 0-4.0). I was satisfied with the way they translated the grades.
Oh, and it was a marvelous experience for her. After going through that in 10th grade, her college transition has been very easy by comparison!
My daughter’s high school treats all study abroad credits on a pass/fail basis, and this is how her grades from her time in Argentina appeared on her transcript.
So my advice would be to speak with your daughter’s hs counselor.
And BTW, colleges – even the elite ones – LOVE students who did a year abroad. It’s almost “the ultimate” EC.
You may want to tell your child to not get a tattoo. Mine did that at age 14, underage even for the country visited for study abroad. As a mom it never occurred to me to tell child to not do this. Tattoo was hidden for two years before mom accidentally saw it.
See if you can select the courses in France. Take math instead of French literature. Take classes that include activities - cooking, art, physical education. Language shouldn’t matter as much in those courses yet she’ll still be interacting with students.
My sister did a year in Germany (as a college student). She took science classes, with labs. She took art history. She took some sports classes.
Congratulations! I wish more American HS students did this! We had a German girl stay with us last year and it was a wonderful experience for her and us! Her family is now hosting an American girl, who didn’t know German before going. From what I gather speaking with my host daughter, she struggled a bit at first but is getting along much better now. Best of luck to both of you, I’ll be excited to hear how she does come college acceptance time!
@Dustyfeathers We hosted a student who was vaguely hinting about tattoos and we told her “No way!” Wait until you are 18!
Our German student that we hosted was in Gymnasium (the highest level of German High School) and they would not count the classes she took in the US for credit…so she took what she liked (not big on math and science, so skipped those…not sure if that was a good idea or not) but took English, History, Drama, Psychology, Cooking, etc.
Our student was through YFU (Youth For Understanding) and did know english before she came here.
In my second year of French in high school we read Le Petit Prince, Camus, Rimbaud, Appolinaire… Not the fat 19th century novels - but real books and real poems. Even if she has to read the books in conjunction with an English translation - I’d still want to read French literature. At any rate as a high school student I doubt she has any choice in the matter. At least the way French education worked in my day, there were three or four tracks and all of them would have required a French course just like American high schools generally require an English course each year. There weren’t electives and sports was not part of the school’s program.
In any event the more French she can cram in before going to France the more she’ll get out of the experience. The year I spent learning about French and World history from the French point of view was eye opening.
A fifteen-year-old (and pretty much everyone else) will probably love Dumas. (Dumas pere, the famous one.) Dumas is like the father of TV miniseries. His books are one dramatic situation after another, with great dialogue. They’re long, like most 19th Century novels, thanks in no small part to the fact that they were originally published in installments (like TV shows), and if a series was successful no one had any incentive to end it quickly. They are fast-moving and fun to read, in addition to providing the French with a compelling shared narrative about their history.
Dumas was even ahead of his time in employing a staff of professional writers to draft up the story lines he gave them. He was the first showrunner. Plus, bonus!, he was a person of color, really the first to be accepted as a mainstream author in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire.
In fact, so many of the Dumas books have been made into movies and miniseries you could probably watch them first so that reading the book will be less of a struggle.
When my daughter attended high school in Russia, she was given a grade of “4” in all her classes. She barely had a clue what was going on in any of the classes other than English (where she functioned more like a teacher’s aid) and skipped school regularly. She was given marks of “4” in every class. Under their grading system that’s the equivalent of a B. It was a written report, but I don’ think it was the official form used locally.
However, my daughter did need the credits to graduated from her home school, and in the US a “4” is interpreted as an A – so on the home transcript it was a bunch of A’s. While that was great for her unweighted GPA it was actually something of a drag overall, given that they were 4 point A’s rather than 5 point weighted AP/honors A’s. So maybe the two grading systems weren’t so different after all.
My impression was that it was essentially a matter of courtesy to foreign exchange students — that is, it was understood by all that the foreign high school student doesn’t have sufficient fluency to keep up, but the cultural exchange aspect is an overall asset to the school and community-- so the students are not subject to the same expectations as the native student. I think that a fairly widespread custom to cut the exchange student a lot of slack.
Obviously, not something you can count on, but that was DD’s experience. She wrote her college app essays about the challenges of living in a country with such poor command of the language – it was very insightful and humorous essay, but also abundantly clear that she could not possibly been participating in her high school classes on anything beyond a rudimentary level. But the basic theme of the essay was “challenge you have faced” and I am quite certain that essay was the key to her admission at reach colleges.
Even though my DD only spent a semester in Russia it was very much an asset when it came to college apps. Ad coms know that not all learning takes place in the classroom, and that the experience of living abroad with a host family and attending school deserves respect.
My advice: find out in advance how the local school will treat and record the foreign transcript so there are no surprises down the line. (Try to get an agreement in writing in case there is a change in high school g.c.'s between the time she leaves and returns). But other than that, not to worry.
I am currently studying abroad in Spain for the fall of my junior year (only for the semester) and I was originally under the impression that my grades would not count back in the US but my counselor emailed me and said that not only are the going onto my transcript but also my GPA. I am very concerned about this because all my classes are in spanish and while I am getting about 5 & 6 on a 10 point scale, which is passing and normal grades for the native students these transfer into Cs in the US and I worry that it will kill my GPA and college chances. My dream school is UCLA and I am worried that they wont see passed the grades and realized they were in an entirely different language.
Talk to your local HS counselors as well. They often can get some courses into pass/fail easily for reporting purpose. In some cases, they will look into situations and even take one or a few courses out of the HS transcript when they deem reasonable and appropriate.
Kitkat, are you a California resident? I don’t think that the grades in those classes would count toward your UC GPA because they aren’t on the approved A-G list (which essentially requires that the courses come from an accredited school). So even though they might impact your general high school GPA, they probably won’t be counted as part of your UC GPA.
My daughter did the same thing as you – one semester abroad, fall of junior year. I think the biggest ding for her was that being abroad limited the number of AP courses she could take, as well as putting her off track for math and science courses (her school wouldn’t allow her to enroll in pre-calc, physics, or APUSH mid year) – so she ended up with a light schedule her spring semester, with many of the potentially GPA-boosting AP / honors courses pushed over to the following year. She did get into all of the UC’s she applied to, however – so it really didn’t hurt her in the long run. Especially given that the time spent abroad was definitely a more enriching experience overall.