Spreading hours for electives/subjects over more than one year - ok to do?

[mlktwins]

Is it ok to spread hours for an elective over 2 school years?  For example, the boys did photography last year for an elective.  They have quite a few hours in from reading books on specific aspects of photography, watching a Creative Live course on photography, playing with the cameras, etc.  They have spreadsheets tracking what they did, when, and how much time was spent on it.  But...we didn't get out and do all the assignments I wanted to do specific to outings to various places to take pictures.  Then Covid happened in March and that went by the wayside - was waiting to get out in nicer weather.  We want to finish that this spring.  Can I still count all the hours towards that elective and, if so, how would you list it on a transcript?

Thanks much!

[almondbutterandjelly]

Yes!  One credit is 120-180 hours.  I did my transcripts by subject so it would have been (probably under a Fine Arts heading):  Photography 1.0 credit 

If you list by year instead, generally people do when they completed the class/hours.

[Lori D.]

1 hour ago, mlktwins said:

Is it ok to spread hours for an elective over 2 school years? ... Can I still count all the hours towards that elective and, if so, how would you list it on a transcript?

Yes, you can spread out 1 credit over 2, 3, or even 4 years with no problem.

You can list the 1.0 credit in the grade/year in which it was completed, OR, you can list partial credit in each of the grades/years where the credit was worked on.

Covid is equally wrecking every high schooler's course of study (homeschool, public school, private school), so everyone will have unusual transcripts for the next few years. Colleges will adapt for that. 😉 

Edited January 18, 2021 by Lori D.

[katilac]

I did our transcripts by subject, with the exception of one school that required dates - for them, I just put the year the credit was finished. If your student has a decent number of credits, doing partial credits is likely to push the transcript over one page. 

[cbollin]

The cover school we used suggested "If a student takes longer to complete the course, issue partial credit (.5) for the first half of the course.  The remaining .5 credit is given when the course is completed."  This was common approach with electives. They issued transcripts by date not by subject.

[cintinative]

We are doing drawing/art once a week so I am only issuing 0.25 credit hour per year. Is it better to record it every other year as a 0.5 credit? I thought that since there is a progression (which I guess they won't see unless they look at the course descriptions), it was better to show we were consistently working on it.  

[Lori D.]

3 hours ago, cintinative said:

We are doing drawing/art once a week so I am only issuing 0.25 credit hour per year. Is it better to record it every other year as a 0.5 credit? I thought that since there is a progression (which I guess they won't see unless they look at the course descriptions), it was better to show we were consistently working on it.  

Do what works best for you and makes the most sense for your student. 😄 

Just what we did, and there are oodles of different ways of doing it that are just as good or better 😉 :
After doing tons of thinking and overthinking, since transcripts are largely for colleges,  I finally came to the decision of making the the transcript as easy as possible for college admission officers to understand and see if the student had the required types of credits and amounts of credits. So I listed the 2 credits that were earned over 2 or more years as just 1.0 credit, and I named all of our classes in a very straightforward way, like: "English 9: American Lit.", or, "Fine Arts: Filmmaking".

I came to that decision after realizing that I was SO sweating and overthinking a ton of tiny details like this -- and that college admission officers would take all of 5 minutes to check to make sure that my students had the required requisite credits, and then they move on to the next student, lol.