Transcript Grading Scale Question

[Garga]

I'm looking into Duel Enrollment.  The local community college has asked for an unofficial transcript.  She said, "Just something unofficial, so we can see what he's taken and what sorts of grades he has."  

Ok...I wasn't ready to create a transcript this year, so I'm trying to scramble to get one together by next week.  Everything is fine, until I go online and see samples of the grading scale.  I thought that 90-100 was a 4.0, 80-89 was a 3.0, etc.  But apparently I was wrong.  I keep seeing things like this:

98-100 is a 4.0  OR 94-100 is a 4.0  (These two scales are different....so is there no standardization?  These are for regular classes--not honors or AP or anything.)

90-97 is a 3.7  OR 90-93 is a 4.0  (Still a difference.) 

87-89 is a 3.33  OR  85-90 is a 3.33  (Yup, the differences continue) 

Sooo....there are different scales.  Some are more stringent than others.  How do I know which one to use?  Do I just pick one and let the college decide if I'm picking something goofy or not?

And now I feel a little conundrum.  I was just giving my student an A or a B in general.  I wasn't coming up with an exact number. My student has done all I've asked, and if he wasn't getting a concept, we kept at it until he did.  Or if I felt he hadn't pushed himself to do his best, I had him redo the work.  I had not been coming up with exact number grades, like 85.5% or whatever.  I just pushed him to learn the content and produce the best work he could.  And so I felt comfortable saying, "You got an A."  If he had ever turned into the kind of student who just refused to do the work, or was sloppy on purpose, I would have had a stern talk with him and then might have had to lower grades.  But he's not like that.  He works hard and if it's not up to snuff, I provide feedback and he redoes the work better.  There's no reason for him not to get an A.

So what do I do now?  Do I go back over his work and come up with numbers to assign to each thing he did?  But that's not always how our homeschool works.  It's not like he takes a test and gets a 75% and we move on.  If he got less than a 90% on a test, I had to him restudy and relearn and retake the test, until he learned the material and could get a 90% or better.  

If I decide to come up with numbers for grades, what grading scale do I use?  Make up my own, that 90%-100% is a 4.0 or use one of the above?

(I thought that the transcript part would be the easiest thing to create, but it doesn't feel that way right now.)

 

ETA:  For my son's outsourced online classes, those teachers did provide a number grade, so I can use what they gave. They based all the grades solely on test scores (Algebra II, Geometry, Chemistry, Spanish I and II.)  But for my own classes, like my homegrown Egyptology class, we didn't do any tests.  He watched Great Courses, and read books, and did projects and wrote essays and creative myths. For his projects, basically I made him do the work until it was A-worthy.  Like, if he wrote a myth and I thought it could be written better, I had him work on it until he wrote it better. 

For his biology class, I have scores for all his tests, so I can tally those up.  But some of the artistic classes like photography are tricky to grade. 

 

Any insights?  

[regentrude]

It doesn't matter,  since a grading scale is completely meaningless without the assignments. Pick something simple. I did 90,80,70 for a,b,c resp. 

[klmama]

I also did 90-100, 80-89, 70-79, etc.  That's what our local public schools use.  

[Garga]

Thank you guys!  I also found this website late last night after I wrote the above post: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/hsts/howgpa.aspx.  It's National Center for Education Statistics and it goes with the 90-100 scale. I'm going to cite it on the transcript, just to look fancy ?

Writing a transcript late at night leads to foggy over-thinking. When I woke up this morning, I felt comfortable with what to do.  What everyone has written above just confirms my own thoughts.

[MerryAtHope]

I also did the 90-80-70 scale, and A = 4.0 etc...

No need to "justify" it on your transcript. Just list the scale you use.

[katilac]

I did not list a grading scale on my transcript and not a single college asked for one. 

[Mom22ns]

14 hours ago, katilac said:

I did not list a grading scale on my transcript and not a single college asked for one. 

Same here.