Advice from a college rep

[Dmmetler]

DD went to a college fair last night. She has a rather non-standard high school/college path.

Purdue’s rep made a suggestion last night that seems like it may apply to other schools, too-or at least be worth considering.

She said that if your high school transcript doesn’t follow the usual model, or if you have multiple transcripts to please contact them and set an appointment the summer before senior year to give them time to look them and ask questions. The example she gave is that a college screenwriting course is definitely a valid option for meeting a high school English requirement, but when a reviewer only has a few minutes to do a first pass, they may miss that a course with a FILM prefix is English. The same is true for classes taken in non-standard time frames, like a CTY summer course designed for high school credit, since they look for semesters of courses taken on that first pass. Taking the time to contact them in advance and sit down with them and explain what you did can be the difference between accepted and being rejected outright because they missed that you did have the credits, or wait listed (or accepted to the college but not the program you wanted) because they pushed your application to the side and by the time they got to it, there wasn’t room for you.

 

 

[8filltheheart]

I agree with the advice. We ran into the issue more in terms of Self-Reporting Academic Records than concern about properly identifying category of coursework.  SRARs do not work well for non-traditional courses or sequences. (For example, not taking AP courses but taking courses like French 7.) When we contacted schools that used SRARs about our homeschool approach not conforming with traditional approaches that work with a drop down menu, they were definitely willing to meet with us. But, we wasted time trying to figure out what to do vs contacting admissions right away. In hindsight, as soon as I saw a drop down menu, I should have called and not tried to fill it out.

[catz]

That's helpful!  We're doing an over arching homeschool transcript broken down by subject area that will pair with a DE transcript.  We will also have detailed course descriptions (including DE classes), resources and contact info for outside teaches.  I can see why a non-standard transcript could lead to possible confusion in admissions and potential problems.  

[Dmmetler]

I expect her examples were DD specific, since DD had asked about applying when she had completed an associates while in high school, and had answered the "what's your ACT" question with "Well, in 6th grade I had a X, but I haven't taken it again yet", implying talent search involvement. I assume it applies more generally as well, which is why I thought it seemed worth sharing.

 

[Sebastian (a lady)]

2 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

I agree with the advice. We ran into the issue more in terms of Self-Reporting Academic Records than concern about properly identifying category of coursework.  SRARs do not work well for non-traditional courses or sequences. (For example, not taking AP courses but taking courses like French 7.) When we contacted schools that used SRARs about our homeschool approach not conforming with traditional approaches that work with a drop down menu, they were definitely willing to meet with us. But, we wasted time trying to figure out what to do vs contacting admissions right away. In hindsight, as soon as I saw a drop down menu, I should have called and not tried to fill it out.

This was an issue we had with the UC app, because some of his courses were semester long with semester grades and some were year long with yearly grades and some were semester long with a full credit (like college classes).  It was challenging to even answer preliminary questions.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

When I did my first transcript it had one sheet that was a subject transcript.  On the 2nd sheet I showed all my math for calculating GPA including how and why I weighted some classes.

I realized later that this was in chronological order, so I'd basically given schools both a subject and a chronological transcript.

I also occasionally renamed classes on the transcript.  For example Ancient Greek Literature was the semester of Muse Unloosed from Lukeion (this was explained in detail in the course description).