Is it practical for a homeschool to deliver senior high school science?

Not only did our targeted schools accept our science records, they also supplied us great scholarships, including two full-tuition scholarships at my sons' first choice university!

In our homeschool, we had "Biology with Lab" on the transcript. I gave course descriptions for colleges and universities. The course description was a single paragraph in total, that described how we taught biology. Much of the details I got from the catalog description of the textbook we used. I wrote a list of the labs that we did, using the list from the book's table of contents. I demonstrated my grading considerations, carefully showing every chapter grade, and a grade for every lab write-up my children completed. A good lab write up got 100%, but some of them "weren't so good. "  That gave the colleges a thorough clarification of just what our transcript meant when it reported "Biology with Lab. "  I kept all the exams and all the lab write-ups, in case a college or university would ask for a sample of their work (several did! )#).

We did all our work in all our sciences in the home by ourselves. To be honest, I don't know a thing about physics, so my kids were entirely on their own with that one (with some help from a video tutorial. )#)  I just graded tests and looked at the lab write ups. (If the lab write up made sense to me, they got 100% - if it didn't make sense to me, they got something less. )#)  Although I do understand biology and chemistry, they did most of that work on their own as well.

Quite a few (even most) colleges will accept lab sciences done in your house. There are several exceptions, however. As an example, the University of Washington wants "proof" of science instruction. That's why they have a preference for the ACT test. The ACT covers more than reading, writing and math. It covers science at the same time. They recognize the ACT test as "proof. "  They also recognize SAT 2, AP, and community college lab sciences as "proof. "  But the University of Washington is in the minority, because almost all colleges and universities don't have additional conditions. The UW regulations have also changed a good deal as time passes. If your child is interested in ANY college, it's a good idea to check their regulations every year, because they can change considerably.

Forgetting about record keeping is on of "The 5 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make When Homeschooling High School. " If you are thinking about accreditation and transcripts, you are probably not going to make this mistake! Learn how to avoid all 5 mistakes in my free e-mail mini-course.

My e-book, "The Easy Truth About Homeschool Transcripts" will show you how to how to package that great at-home education into an AMAZING transcript that will impress the colleges!