Here's my thinking.... I've pretty much settled on how I'm weighting. There are many ways to do it. I just need one. I'm opting to go with what a couple of the private local schools do. It makes more sense to me than the local public school's weighting of +1.0 for either an AP or an "honors" course. I'm also pretty much settled on including a weighted GPA with the unweighted one. There's just no reason not to. The school can do whatever it wants with it. Do I really need to ask every school what they do? If they only use an unweighted GPA, it's right there. They can completely ignore the weighted one. Does having a weighted GPA have any negative impact on a school that only uses unweighted? What do you do if you only put unweighted and then come across somewhere that it _mattered_ that I didn't put a weighted GPA in? Upload a second transcript, I guess. But why risk it? Why not just put the info down from the beginning? If the unweighted gpa is front & center, I don't see any downside to indicating a weighted GPA. I hope I'm not missing something obvious! ETA: The one place it might matter is on the Common App where they ask if GPA is weighted or unweighted. I'm planning to say unweighted there, and to put in an unweighted GPA bec I know weighted is pretty arbitrary about which courses each individual school or each parent weighted and how much. If they want to see weighted, they'll need to look at the transcript for it.

I've _heard_ that it can affect scholarship/merit aid offers not to have a weighted gpa. That's the only reason I'm including it. I'll have the unweighted GPA by year and a cumulative unweighted GPA. The only place I'll indicate a weighted GPA is up at the top, under the unweighted GPA, and I'll put a note in the notes section about how I weighted (0.5 for honors, 1.0 for AP/College). The school can completely ignore it, or they can go in and re-weight according to their own standards. I really don't care. But I don't want to leave out a data point that might possibly matter. I don't see any downside to including it.

Regentrude--just curious... Why did you want the actual transcript as a separate file. I was thinking of uploading both transcript (as first page) and course descriptions as a single, multi-page document. The transcript would be the first page, so it would still be "front & center," and the course descriptions would all follow so the reader wouldn't have to go looking for a second document. Now I'm wondering if there's a downside to doing it like that? (Probably just personal preference, but thought I'd ask.) Thank you! And thank you, again, for taking the time to field all these questions for those of us new to the whole college app process! yvonne

I'd be tempted to put the year of speech club in, especially if he participated in tournaments. Not only is speech time and work-intensive, it's also a way to build certain skills that one does not get from many other activities. It isn't something that the majority of students have done. It's definitely not an underwater-basket-weaving type of activity, nor is it a filler "Secretary of the Chess Club" type of activity. I think having participated in speech says something (very positive!) about a student, even if the student only did it for a year and regardless of how the student placed at tournaments. Anybody who's been at all involved with speech, themselves or through their children, will appreciate the value of it. Even if the particular person who reads your son's application doesn't have personal experience with speech, chances are he's met students with a speech background and knows what that can mean. I can't imagine there's any downside to including it. So what if he didn't continue? That year was undoubtedly a year of some serious growth. You can't do speech at a competition level without getting a lot out of it. He stuck with it. He found it wasn't where he wanted to put his time. He competed, completed the year, and moved on to other things. It's all good. ETA: Another thought... If you don't want to put it down as an extra curricular, you could include it as an elective on his transcript! I would think it would mean more as an EC than as an elective. Doesn't an EC suggest that it was more a personal interest and self-driven choice than an academic elective? And that the student put more personal time into it than an elective done for school credit? That may just be how it feels to me w/ my own kids.

Thanks for the suggestion! If I have the correct process, though, I can do the calculating. I just want to make sure it is the correct process. I would be mortified if I sent in a transcript and it turned out I'd miscalculated something.

I want to include both unweighted and weighted GPA on my sons' transcripts and want to be sure I'm calculating this correctly. Assuming +0.5 for an "honors" class and +1.0 for an AP/College class, would this be correct? 3.75 credits of regular classes with A's (4.0 x 3.75 = 15) 4.00 credits of "honors" classes with A's (4.5 x 4 = 18) ========= 33/7.75 = 4.26 weighted GPA for the year? For a cumulative, to-date, weighted GPA, I'd follow the same process but calculate the total in Grades 9, 10, and 11? It seems silly to include the "electives" like PE, "Instrumental Music," etc. in an academic GPA, but it might make things more confusing to not include them. I have them listed w/ grades & credits in an "Electives" section on the transcript. Should I just leave them in the GPA calculation so I don't have to explain anything anywhere? I am completely out of space on the transcript, if I want to keep it to one page. Could put it in the School Profile, "Grading" section, but they'd have to go looking for it.

I'd be interested in any thoughts on Emory & Henry, too. My daughter saw it in the CTCL book and wants to see it now.

When my boys were looking at trying the local public high school, we looked into this for their Latin and Greek classes. Students wanting to get official/transcript credit for a class outside the school had to fill out a request w/ the details. We did this for Lukeion's Latin & Greek and were denied. My boys would have had to after school the Latin & Greek, take the Latin SAT & AP, and send those scores with whatever other test scores they had. As a pp mentioned, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, time-wise, to carry a full load at the high school and after school something like Latin & Greek. My boys opted to home school, so we never tried.

When my kids have classes with a middle of the night deadline, they set a 9pm deadline for themselves so they don't miss it. They've been doing online classes for a while and we're in PST while most online providers are on EST, so it's just something we have to do. WHA has a system that shows deadlines pretty clearly. Could you sit down with him every night at 9 pm and have him pull up his WHA course assignments page and check the deadline for any assignments due that day? Sure, lots of days might not have an assignment due, but it's mostly just to build the habit. If you do it with him every.single.day for a couple of weeks, maybe he'll get in the habit of checking on his own? If he sees a 1 am deadline at 9pm, at least he still has time to get the assignment done.

Thanks for mentioning this. I had thought that a pdf was like a picture and wouldn't be dependent on the reader having a specific font in order for it to display correctly. (I am sooo behind the technology curve. Kind of embarrassing being in Silicon Valley. LOL) Guess I'll stick w/ Times New Roman.

Thanks for these details, Sebastian. This is a great idea. I think I'll add a short blurb to the school profile section on "Grading" to do the same, explain that courses designated as "honors" were so designated by the provider or, as someone else mentioned they used standard college texts. I had settled on weighting "honors" courses with 0.5 point and AP/College with 1.0 point, but I don't know what the best solution is there.

We've listened to many TC lectures, as well, and learned a lot from them. And I didn't even have to pay college tuition rates for them! I guess I also saw the limitations of recorded lectures like that, where the listener is relatively passive & limited to his/her own thoughts about the material. We would not have gotten nearly as much out of the TC lectures if we hadn't been listening, pausing the lectures and talking about it together, as it was going on. It wouldn't have been the same to jot down aha moments or questions or thoughts and then, at some later date/time, get together and talk about it after the fact. Either way seems to work... large lectures + smaller sections or small classes. It's personal preference. For my children (and for the tuition money we'll be spending), I'd rather see them at a college/university with smaller class size, where all classes are taught by professors rather than other students/TAs. I had assumed all state universities would be like UCB or UCSD with large lectures for hundreds of students and student-led sections for discussion, so I appreciate 8's posting that this is not the case everywhere.

Write notes and take photos. I'm finding that having photos, including some with the student guide in it, as we toured the campus jogs my memory of where we heard & saw what. It was hard to take notes while walking & talking.

Likewise, I have no experience whatsoever with a large university. I attended a liberal arts college and never had a class larger than 25. I can't imagine attending purely one-way lectures in a literature or history class with 100 or more other students. Even in a large, 100+ student lecture, isn't there some student-teacher interaction?

This could be the case for physics and math, but large sections would make a big difference in a literature or maybe most humanities courses.

Hope we hear more, too, but it is still good to know I'm not the only one struggling with some of these hoops. You're ahead of me.... I wouldn't even have known what zeemee was!

I really hope "resumes" are optional. My kids only have a handful of activities that can be handled on the ComApp form. A "resume" is going to look pretty ridiculous for them. It's great as an _option_ for someone who's got loads of ECs or outside, non-typical activities or work experience that they want to highlight somewhere. But, requiring a "resume"? What exactly are they expecting or looking for?

Will the same school profile go to both students' colleges if I'm listed as the counselor for both?

:party: :party: :party: Hooray for you and your student!!! I can't wait till we have one in!!! It will feel like we've hit a HUGE milestone!

Found it. My son hadn't hit submit for his portion, yet, so the rest wasn't visible. Got a little panicked. Think I'm good to go. For now. Thanks!

And where do you assign an "endorser"?

Where did you enter transcript info? I've got the pull downs for generic info and only added the highest level courses the student took, as suggested (below) for hs families. I don't see any where to upload a transcript or manually enter the courses the student completed. Do they ask for a transcript anywhere? "NOTE: The "Build Your Curriculum" section of the School Profile is primarily designed for schools that will be completing and submitting applications for multiple students in NMSC's scholarship programs. If, as a Homeschool Parent Teacher, you do not wish to build a detailed school curriculum, simply add only the highest level courses and click the "Mark as Complete" buttons for "Build Your Curriculum - AP / IB" and "Build Your Curriculum - Add Other Courses." Then, after submitting the completed School Profile, simply input individual courses directly into the academic record section (Section B) of the student's application."

I did those. In the directions, before the drop downs, it said, in bold: "The links below allow you to navigate between the pages of the School Profile. Although your student is homeschooled, please complete the School Profile section to the best of your ability. ..." Besides the drop downs, there's a box for.... "School Profile CommentsYou may use this section of the School Profile to explain any unique aspect of your school's curriculum or grading system. You may also use this section to communicate any pertinent information not included elsewhere on the application that may help reviewers at NMSC interpret the academic records from your school. Once you are finished adding comments, or if you do not have any comments to add, click the "Mark as Complete" button and continue to the School Profile Review page." I just tried cutting & pasting my SP as-is and turns out space is limited to about 46 words. Hm.

If you did both NMSQT SF and ComApp, did you use the same "School Profile" for both? If you have any suggestions for the basic structure/topic sections, please share!

That is terrible! How can they do that to someone this late in the game? I'm glad you found a possibility. There are some good people out there.