Can Universities Accept Homeschool Science? - By: RobertBrowns

Is it possible for a homeschool to provide high school science that will be sufficient to universities? My boys had biology, chemistry and physics at home, all with science labs, without any outside support from schools or co-ops. Not only did our selected universitys accept our science records, they also provided 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 universities. The course description was a single paragraph long, 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 standards, 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 description of just what our transcript meant when it stated "Biology with Lab. " I preserved all the assessments and all the lab write-ups, in case a university would ask for a sample of their work (a few did! )#).

We did all our work in all our sciences from 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 the home. There are a few exceptions, however. For instance, the University of Washington wants "proof" of science instruction. That's why they favor the ACT test. The ACT covers more than reading, writing and math. It covers science also. They recognize the ACT test as "proof. " They also allow SAT 2, AP, and community college lab sciences as "proof. " But the University of Washington is in the minority, because the majority of universities don't have additional demands. The UW guidelines have also changed a good deal in time. If your child is excited about ANY college, it's a good idea to check their guidelines 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!

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