If you plan to homeschool your child through high school, you’ve probably wondered what to do for a high school transcript. As a homeschooling family, you’ll create your own transcript, but it’s not as hard as you might think.
My sister was dual-enrolled at the local community college for a few years of high school. My mom realized how important it was for her to have a well-crafted homeschool transcript. Fortunately, she had one, but if she hadn’t, it would have made it nearly impossible to dual-enroll at the community college.
Even if you don’t plan on sending your student to college, having a homeschool transcript is necessary for multiple reasons!
Why does my student need a homeschool transcript?
If your high school graduate plans on attending a college of any kind (community college or a university), they’ll need a high school transcript to apply for enrollment. In addition to enrollment applications, most scholarship applications require the submission of a transcript.
Okay, but what if your student doesn’t plan to attend college? This is a route that more and more graduates are taking, but they’ll still need that transcript! If your student plans to go straight into the workforce, their potential employer may ask for their transcript or high school diploma. In addition, an increasing number of trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and certification courses require a high school transcript.
Pro Tip! Better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. If you start working on your student’s transcript while they are still in high school, adding classes to it as they complete them, it’s easier to keep up with it than scrambling to pull it all together when they graduate.
Keep reading to snag a free editable Google doc to begin creating your student’s transcript with our template!
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Student’s Homeschool Transcript
Now that you know why your high schooler needs a transcript, let’s dive into the steps you need to take to get ‘er done! Keep in mind that each state varies on its homeschool requirements and laws. Although your state won’t tell you exactly how to write a transcript, there may be information you have to submit to the state, depending on where you live.
Transcript Basics
A home school transcript needs to include some basic information about your student. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Student’s name
- Parent’s name
- Student’s date of birth
- Student’s address
- The name of their school (or simply Homeschool)
- Address of school (likely the same as the student’s address)
- Email address (the parent’s email address)
- Phone number (the parent’s phone number)
Most often, this information is listed at the top of the transcript.
Credits, Grades, and Test Scores
Now, we get to the good stuff – the heart of your student’s transcript. This is where the importance of recording and documenting comes into play. Although it may be helpful to track grades in middle school, it is essential to do so in high school.
For each subject course your high schooler takes, you’ll need to include the following on the transcript:
- Course name
- Year courses were completed
- Final course grade
- Credits earned
- Cumulative grade
The course name can be as simple as “Biology” or as complex as “Intro to Theological Literacy and Composition” (yep, I definitely made that course up). In order to calculate the final grade for each course, you’ll have to use a grading system for the course, which most educators compute through homework assignments and testing (that’s another blog post for another time!).
Courses are typically broken up by academic year with all of the courses, their grades, and number of credits for each year listed together (you’ll see an example on our transcript template, which you can access below).
Because every state has different credit requirements, not all transcripts will look the same when it comes to coursework and accreditation. Regardless, you must compute the cumulative grade for all high school courses. This can be done by adding up each grade point average (GPA) and dividing the cumulative GPA by the total number of credit hours taken. You can do this by semester, year, and all four years combined! Colleges and employers will often look at the cumulative GPA to understand how driven and hardworking your student was.
Extras, Extras, Extras!
In addition to the necessary parts of a transcript, you can also add the following, if applicable:
- Standardized test scores (SAT, ACT AP exams)
- Academic honors (not super popular in home school, but definitely possible!)
- Outside evidence (if your student took a course through an academy or co-op, this may be helpful to list)
You may notice that weighting grades isn’t on any of our lists. I don’t recommend weighting grades on a homeschool transcript. Keep it straightforward and simple.
How to Format a Home School Transcript
So, you’ve got all of the info needed for your high schooler’s transcript, but how do you format it? Although there isn’t a specific requirement for formatting, we do have some suggestions that look professional and are easy to read! Above all, know that it doesn’t need to be fancy. As long as it contains the necessary information in an organized format, don’t feel like you need to add any extra design or “fluff”!
We’ve created a transcript template you can access and begin using right away. It makes it easy to create a professional-looking transcript for your student. Bonus, it’s a FREE editable document you can customize for your student. Access the template by entering your email address below!
Putting It All Together
At Journey Homeschool Academy, we believe in high-quality learning. But we also believe that this learning doesn’t have to be hard! Choosing coursework and creating a transcript shouldn’t be daunting. We try to make our online high school science courses easy for you to implement in your homeschool journey. You won’t find it difficult to transfer our course info into your high school student’s transcript.
As long as you have the necessary information listed in the bullet points above, your student will have a transcript primed and ready for college, scholarships, trade school, and beyond!