Common App- Midyear Report

[mirabillis]

Please help! I need to do the midyear report transcript...

All of my ds's classes are year-long classes. But he does have 'semester' in-progress grades.

1. Should I change it from IP ---> A/IP (showing 1st semester/2nd semester)

2. And if I do reflect semester grades, do I reconfigure GPA? If so, how? Anyone want to help?

[RootAnn]

I struggled with this because my transcript format of choice did not have slots for semester grades. I did a cover page showing 1st semester in progress grades & a cumulative GPA based on those (.5 credits for each semester grade).

[UmmIbrahim]

I had these same issues. I ended up breaking all of the year-long courses in half (and using footnotes to indicate where I was assigning grades for the first semesters of year-long courses). I then recomputed the GPA using 0.5 credits for the completed portions of those classes. 

This probably ended up being a bit confusing because my transcript is already a "subject-based" one to start with. I had a separate box with "In progress" and "expected" senior year coursework which was fine when all of the completed classes were from 9th - 11th grade. However, now it's kind of kludgey with the in-progress box having all of the second semester courses (some of which are just the second half of the year-long courses) and then the completed courses in the main subject based area above. The year-long courses then appear twice, which stretched the transcript onto another page (grr...) I couldn't think of a better way to do it though, because kids in schools are getting benefit of the additional data of mid-year grades and I didn't want to do the "we only assign grades upon completion" or something that I saw as an option online. 

Luckily, only one school didn't recognize my mid-year transcript as such, and had a red X in the portal (and DS applied to an insane number of schools, lol, so only one confusion ain't bad!). When I called them, it turned out that they did indeed have it, with the correct date, but didn't recognize it as such because of the fact that it is subject-based and not year-based. I just didn't have a good way of indicating only the completed portions of 12th grade classes. It's been fine so far, though, on the admissions side 😁

[Mom0012]

On my dd’s transcript at the beginning of the year, I included her senior year courses like this:

Great Books           (12th)

For the mid year report, I updated classes that were done or had a semester or final grade for her fall CC classes:

Great Books.            (A)

I have a key on the transcript that originally said classes in (. ) were in progress.

Since some of the classes were semester classes that were completed by the time I submitted my mid year report, I changed the key to say classes in (. ) were senior year classes. For second semester CC classes, I left the courses with the (12th). For all others, I put in the final grade if the course was over or the midterm grade if it was a year long class.

[TarynB]

I don't think there is one correct way to do it. Sources seem to vary all over in their suggestions. It depends on how you want to play the game.

Our local public high school shows the fall semester grade for full-year courses in the body of the transcript for a mid-year report, but does not recalculate the cumulative GPA  to include fall semester grades for those full-year courses because those courses are incomplete. Their position is that the mid-year report is meant to show colleges that the student is not slacking due to senioritis (or maybe the student is slacking, whatever the case is), but it is not meant to provide an updated cumulative GPA. The cumulative GPA gets updated for year-long courses only on the final/end of 12th grade transcript. It's a conservative approach. So, bottom line, fall semester grades are listed but not incorporated in to the cumulative GPA on the mid-year report.

However, one-semester courses via DE are handled differently. The course is complete, so the credit counts and the grade gets averaged in to the GPA mid-year.

I followed the same process, since I didn't want to be perceived as padding the transcript compared to public school students from our area, and it felt right to me to do it that way. I explained it in the notes section of the transcript: "For Mid-Year Report, GPA and cumulative credits were updated to reflect only the 12th grade one-semester courses completed as of 12-20-2019." For others reading, based on others' BTDT advice here on this forum, I had also planned ahead and formatted DS's transcript to have a column for 1st semester grades and a column for 2nd semester grades for the 12th grade year (but only a single column for grades in prior years). DS's transcript is a blend of by subject and by year . . .  by subject group in rows down the left margin and by year as you move left to right in columns across the page. It has worked out really well.

Edited February 4, 2020 by TarynB

[mirabillis]

Thanks!
Taryn - I think this is what we'll do. Perfect compromise. 🙂