Diploma Program Record Keeping: How Much is Enough?

A number of years ago I had a conversation with a home schooling parent whose family lived out of state. She told me she had a notebook of documentation that served as “evidence” of what she was doing as a homeschooler. Every minute was accounted for. She was supposed to log 6 to 7 hours a day — Algebra 1 from 8:30-9:30, US History 9:30-10:30, etc. If her students finished early, could she stop recording, I asked.  Nope. The entire day had to be accounted for. Trips to the market to shop had to be categorized as personal finance or consumer education. A walk to the post office was PE. Watching the younger children while mom ran an errand was considered community service.

All so tedious, and unnatural. Amounted to busywork, really, stripping away the joy of home schooling. But, she was told this kind of record keeping was necessary to satisfy the compulsory attendance law in her state. She simply complied rather than fight it. Maybe she got used to home schooling this way. I don’t know.

Fortunately, when it comes to record keeping, I have not found colleges require documentation to this level of minutiae. But, they usually want some documentation to support the grades they see on a transcript. They don’t want grades to be based exclusively on subjective factors such as “I gave him a ‘B’ because he had a good attitude” or “she tried hard every day.” They want documentation that is largely objective and verifiable.

There are four guiding principles when it comes to documenting high school subjects considered to be academic.

• Keep it reasonable
• Keep it objective
• Keep it simple
• Write it down

Take Algebra 1 as an example. The student’s grade on the transcript is a “B” for the first semester and an “A” for the second semester. The college admissions person may ask, “How was this grade determined?” Scholarships and financial award offers are often based on a student’s SAT or ACT score in conjunction with their grade point average (GPA). The GPA represents all the classes the student took and the grades earned.

A reasonable approach to support the posting of a “B” on a transcript for a course such as Algebra 1 would be to base the grade on a couple of considerations: student performance on daily work and tests.

Both need to be documented in writing. The documentation should include the following:

• The date the activity took place
• What the activity was, i.e., daily work, quiz, test, etc.
• A score for the activity showing the number of points scored out of the number of points possible
• A percentage based on the above

Once the student has completed roughly one-fourth of the book and the above has been recorded, the daily work and test scores can be totaled and averaged. Once this is done, the daily work and tests will need to be weighted to justify the grade given. “Weighted” simply means the value you are assigning to these activities.  A common practice by many parents is to weight the tests 50% and daily work 50%. Other parents weight the daily work 60% and tests 40%. Still others weight the daily work 75% and tests 25%.

All of the above weights are reasonable and in common use.

All of the scores and resulting grades are objective. The numbers, once averaged, “speak for themselves.”

This approach is simple.

Admission staff, like you, are busy. They will appreciate this approach. It shows them you’ve thought through how to evaluate your student’s performance, that you’re not “winging it” so to speak. It will make sense to them. 

What about grading courses that are not considered academic but are more experiential? I’ll address that next week.

Thanks for Reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

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