NCAA Core Course Paperwork Questions

[Grantmom]

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I've visited these forums, but thank you so much for everything I have learned here, and for those of you sticking around to help those of us still in this! My youngest is interested in playing a varsity sport in college, and I want to make sure I am doing everything correctly. I have pored through all of the NCAA threads I could find, but I wasn't able to find anything recent. It looks like maybe the NCAA has changed some things since some of those threads, so I just want to make sure I'm understanding things correctly.

Specifically, I have questions about online providers whose courses are not cleared by the NCAA and pre-approved to meet the core course requirements. It looks like for any course that is just homegrown, you fill out the Home School Core Course Worksheet. But if you have used an online provider, then you use the Nontraditional Home School Core Course Worksheet. From reading earlier threads, it looks like maybe this is a new change, and that before these forms were the same. Is that right? 

When it talks about the "Nontraditional" course providers, though, it says, check to see if they are "cleared" in the NCAA system. So I'm worried about how to know that they will accept a course if they aren't on their "cleared" list. Also, if the NCAA doesn't even review your paperwork until a college coach puts in a review request, how can you be sure that what you are doing is all going to be accepted? Is it better to just use community college courses or make sure that the online providers are "cleared"?

Thanks for any advice or insight you can share! 

[easypeasy]

I PMed you! 🙂

[Corraleno]

For online classes that were not preapproved by NCAA, I added some extra assignments and counted the online class as one component of my homeschool class. Since I was the one who ultimately assigned the grades on his transcript, I listed myself as the Teacher of Record, and the online teacher in the Other Teacher category. For example, for an online Latin class, I added 5 practice tests from the American Classical League and listed the National Latin Exam as the "final exam" for the course. For the "Grade Based On" section I listed something like quizzes (from the online class) were worth a total of 50%, 5 ACL exams worth 5% each, and a final exam (National Latin Exam) worth 25%. For an online literature course, I added some extra reading, some Great Courses lectures, and discussion, and made discussion something like 20% of the grade. 

FWIW, NCAA seems to be a lot less picky about the actual content of homeschool classes than they used to be. I've seen examples of CCWs that shocked me with how little was actually done for a full "credit," and yet NCAA approved them. I think the only reason NCAA rejects homeschool courses these days is for technical/procedural reasons, not lack of rigor, so my 2 cents is that I would rather just submit all courses as homeschool classes, rather than risk having them reject a "nontraditional" course for some picky technical reason that ignores the actual content and quality of the course.

They also seem to be granting a lot of Early Academic Qualifiers these days, so that's worth aiming for if you can. Basically as long as you meet 14 or 15 of the 16 total requirements by the end of 11th grade, and the GPA & test scores are reasonably good, they will grant Early Qualifier status, which means you don't have to worry about senior year or submit any more CCWs, just a final transcript after graduation.