64 Transcripts Weighted Cumulative GPA When your student works extra hard and takes honors or college courses, they deserve a little credit. The best way to reflect this is through their GPA. They deserve the have more weight put on the classes that they had to work the hardest for. This way an A in a college class will do more to help their GPA than an A in a similar but easier high school class. The way to calculate this is to give higher numbers to these advanced courses. If you are including a weighted GPA on your transcript, don t forget to include the scale on your transcript as well. Grade Point Scales Standard Honors AP/College A 4.0 4.5 5.0 B 3.0 3.5 4.0 C 2.0 2.5 3.0 D 1.0 1.0 1.0 F 0.0 0.0 0.0 You will notice that we did not weight the grade points for D s or F s. Colleges will only transfer grades of C or better. If your student received a D or F for their efforts at the difficult course they didn t really show an extraordinary effort and therefore did not earn the extra credit. Test Scores Students wishing to attend college need to take extra tests. To be considered for certain scholarships, they take the PSAT in their Junior year. For college admissions they take the SAT, ACT, and/or SAT Subject Tests. For college credit for subjects learned outside of colleges they take CLEP exams. All of these tests are administered by agencies which will send the sealed grades to the universities and colleges of your choice, as long as you request them to do so. Some people believe that it is helpful to the admissions process to include these specific scores on the transcript. It is helpful. It s just not required. If you so desire, include these scores. Remember to label them clearly. Parent s Signature & Date As an added confirmation that you, the parent, have prepared the transcript, on the date cited earlier, sign and date the transcript before sending it off.
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66 Chapter 6 Sample Transcripts In This Chapter Zack s Transcript Julianna s Transcript Katie Beth s Transcript Jenny Rose s Transcript
Sample Transcripts 67 Here are some examples of transcripts. These are our children s transcripts. Each of our children were accepted at all the colleges they applied to. Keep in mind, though, that SATs play an important role in the college application process for homeschoolers. They are more important than grades. When it was time to fill out Katie Beth s college admission packet and prepare her transcripts, I was so nervous. I found a friend named Linda who helped me walk through everything. She showed me what she was doing and looked over my own work, giving me pointers. The next time it was easier. Look for a friend and go through the process together. That s what Laura and I do. She enjoys all the computer work much more than I do. But, we look over each other s applications and transcripts. We help each other plan classes too. When Shine has problems with Pre-Calculus, Laura sits down and walks her through the problems. I just don t remember advanced math. When Josh has problems writing a paper, I help him. Friends are a great asset in homeschooling high school.
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72 Chapter 7 Make Transcripts In This Chapter Using a Word Processor Using a Spreadsheet Program
Make Transcripts 73 Now that we know what goes on the transcript, let s look at how to make one. If you really don t want to tackle creating your own transcript you could just fill in the blank one on the previous page. If you are reading this as an E-book on Acrobat Reader, you should be able to click on different areas of the blank transcript and fill in your own information. Once everything appears as you wish, simply print that page only. I have everything done except the grade point average, I said to Julianna. I was working on transcripts for a friend s son. Here let me show you, Julianna replied. With a few clicks she had a complicated equation in my Microsoft Excel file. I sighed. I have to learn things little by little when it comes to technology. But, I want to commend Laura. She has taught me how to make a transcript on my computer using Excel. Now, I probably can t explain it, so I will let her do it. But, if I can do it, you can too. Laura does this chapter as a workshop at Finish Well. Parents love it! So, Laura, take it away.
74 Make Transcripts Using a Word Processor You could just use a word processor like Microsoft Word and put together something similar to what we ve included here. Some of the boxes (The personal information section, GPAs section, Grading Scale section, and Test Scores section) were inserted as text boxes and the courses, grades and credits sections were a single table. To make it look like four tables, I highlighted the boxes which would be the separation between tables and changed the borders to clear where I wanted a blank space. That means to make the blank column down the center of the page I clicked on the top cell (aka. box) in that column, then I held down the shift button and clicked on the bottom button. I saw at that point that all the cells in that column were highlighted. Then I clicked on the arrow next to the borders button. In Microsoft Word 2007, which I m using, it was found on the Home tab and on the Design tab. Clicking on the arrow next to the borders button will bring up a list. At the bottom of the list you will find an item called Borders and Shading. Click on that. On the right side of the box which pops up you will see a sample of a table with instructions about clicking the borders to change them. Click on all the horizontal lines to make them go away. Don t touch any of the vertical lines. They need to stay. Once you have finished clicking on all the right lines you will see a set of solid vertical lines and no horizontal lines. If there are any lines showing where there shouldn t be, click them. If there are any lines missing where they should exist, click the space where they should appear. Once this is all finished, click Ok. You should now have a blank column in the center of your table, making it look like you have two tables. Use the same process, highlighting the cells across the middle then using the Borders and Shading tool to clear the vertical lines. Now you have what looks like four tables. If you find the idea of working with tables and text boxes too intimidating you could make the entire transcript with no lines at all. It will not look any less professional. Many schools transcripts look exactly like that all text, no lines.
Make Transcripts 75 Using a Spreadsheet Program The rest of this section will cover using a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel to produce a transcript which can calculate cumulative credit hours and GPAs for you automatically. This will get pretty technical so hold on to your hats. I am going to explain EVERY detail of the process. I am using Microsoft Excel 2007 so all my instructions will be specific to that program. OpenOffice.org has a spread sheet program with all the same features; they are just placed differently in their menu system. If you would like to begin creating spread sheet transcripts like I m describing here, but don t already own Microsoft Excel, you could download the free software from OpenOffice.org. All the settings described have been tested and create a transcript that looks a great deal like examples shown above. To avoid confusion, please just follow the instructions and create your transcript precisely as I have prescribed. Once you have finished this, I encourage you to be creative. After you have finished building the initial spread sheet transcript based on these instructions you can play around with the settings and modify the transcript to make it truly your own. I would like to begin by giving you a little information about Microsoft Excel 2007. All of the menus are called tabs. Each tab changes the appearance of the screen and provides a new set of buttons and tools. When you start a spreadsheet the page is usually opened to the Home tab. In this text we will always tell you which tab to click on before we start calling for specific buttons. The tab titles are listed across the top of the screen, just below the Microsoft logo. It should look basically like the example below. Notice that the arrow is pointing to a row of words. These are the menu titles or the tab titles. The Home tab is visible so the word home looks like a folder tab instead of plain, like the rest of the menu titles across this row.
76 Make Transcripts Step 1 Setting up the page The first thing to do when building a transcript on a spreadsheet program is to make sure that your page is set up so that you can fit all the information on a single standard letter size piece of paper. To do this we need to click on the Page Layout tab. Click the Size button, then click on the Letter 8.5 x 11 option. You will next need to click on the Orientation button. Another list will drop down and you must click on the Portrait option. These two options should be automatically set but sometimes get changed, so we start here to ensure that we have the right size paper for our transcripts. The next thing we must do is ensure that we have enough space on this page to work with. To do that we must have the smallest margins possible reserved around our text. Click on the Margins button. Click Custom Margins at the bottom of the pop up list. Click on the box under the word Top and change the number to 0.25. Repeat this process in the boxes under the words Right, Bottom, and Left. Click OK. If you look at the spread sheet page, you will notice letters which run across the top of the page, each corresponding to a column of boxes. Similarly, there is a column of numbers corresponding to the rows of boxes. These numbers and letters are used to identify the boxes, which are called cells within the spread sheet. For example, the highlighted cell (with GPA in it) is called E3, because it is in column E and row 3. A B C D E F G H I 1 2 3 GPA 4 5 Clicking on these letters at the top of the spread sheet also selects the entire column and allows you to modify to width of the columns. We are going to take advantage of this feature to set all the columns for our transcripts. You may be tempted to vary from the numbers I will give you but I urge you to finish the transcript as I prescribe, and then make changes if you don t like the layout.
Make Transcripts 77 Below you will find a chart of the column widths needed for each column. For each you will click on the letter at the top of the column, observe that the entire column is highlighted, click the Home tab, click Format on the drop down menu, and click Column Width. At this point a small window will pop up which allows you to put in a number for the width of the column. Type in the number given in the chart and then click OK. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P 3.86 11 8 8 8 5.29 1.5 1.5 3.86 11 8 8 8 5.29 1.5 1.5 You now have your page ready to fill in a transcript. This is the beginning of your family s transcript template. You ve begun a great work. Let s save it so we don t lose anything that we have invested. Click the round Windows button in the top left corner of the program window. Click on Save As. Since this is very basic and nonspecific at the moment, name it simply transcript. Later when we make this transcript specific for one student, we will give it a new name. Step 2 Setting up the course and grade boxes This part is all about borders. I m doing this next because when there is no text we can easily see what the boxes look like. We re going to build what I call the Year Boxes. They will contain all the course information for your student block by year of school, ie. Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Remember the discussion we had earlier about column letters, row numbers, and cell names. I m going to use these cell names throughout the rest of this discussion to describe where to input different parts of the transcript. With your mouse, click on the cell A9 and then hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on the cell F24. This whole region will become highlighted to look like the example below.