Common homeschool scenario: Sammy Senior is crunching through his college applications, trying to make the 11/1 deadline for best scholarship consideration. Suddenly he calls out, "Mom? It says here we're supposed to upload a Counselor Recommendation and answer a bunch of school profile questions. Can you do that? It's due in an hour.."
Homeschool parents often have no idea they will be called on to write essays about their homeschool philosophy, or submit a counselor recommendation profiling their child.
Ne’er fear – you can do this!
Below is a step-by-step guide for the homeschool parent’s responsibilities on the Common App. Pray through this process; it's a unique opportunity to reflect on your child and your last 18 years of discipling them. Writing up these documents can actually be quite a reflective and moving experience.
Making Common App Accounts
The Common App is a website that lets high school seniors apply to multiple colleges at once through one main form (and a few separate questions for individual colleges). If your child has schools he is interested in which use the Common App, he should make an account and list you as his Counselor.
Once your child lists you as counselor on their application, Common App will email you a link to make an account.
Use the “recommender login” link.
When you log in, it will show you child’s name - click on that and it will take you to the stuff you need to upload.
Profile
After logging in, look on the far left side. Options are Students, Profile, and Resources. Choose Profile. Start filling in everything you can.
Title: Teacher, Chief Administrator, or something similar.
Profile URL, Website: You likely won't have these
School Profile Upload Button:
Here is the perfect opportunity for you to share some who, what, when, where, why, and how of your homeschool. Aim for 1-2 pages long.
Remember that people homeschool differently, and the college really doesn’t know whether your kid spent the day outside breeding goats or locked in a closet filling in workbook pages!
There’s a helpful article about school profiles here, with advice about the kinds of things you can include (why you decided to homeschool, your philosophy, etc.).
The Counselor Letter (which we will get to, below) focuses on your student. The School Profile focuses on your school.
Tell them here what your approach was. Were you essay-heavy, or workbook-based? Classical, Charlotte Mason, unschooling, independent study, tutorial, or project-oriented? (Remember they probably won’t know what terms like “Charlotte Mason” means, so rephrase in ways they might understand – might call that one “great books, discussion-based.”)
Did you exclusively use parent instruction? Private tutors? Weekly co-ops? Online group classes? Did you take classes at the local public school? Community college?
What was your role in instruction – were you meeting with the student all day actually teaching the material? Or by high school were you taking more of a curriculum selection and accountability role? Did you grade the work? Maybe you were a resource when the student got stumped with something. Or did you have frequent extensive discussions about what they were learning?
What were your homeschool’s priorities/goals? Character growth, skill development, competitive edge, flexibility for giftedness or special needs to proceed at own pace, Christian discipleship, service, leadership development, time for pursuit of Olympic-level equestrian studies?
Include some basics, too:
statement that you comply with all your state homeschool requirements
your grading scale
how you weight honors, AP, and college courses in the weighted GPA
your homeschool's graduation requirements (which may or may not match your local public school's graduation requirements. For example, you might require each of your kids to take logic or theology before you let them graduate. That's up to you, as the homeschool administrator.)
Sample profiles are available here, but recognize these are mostly not homeschools, so yours will look very different.
Demographics:
Yes, your answers will look weird - lots of 100% and 0%.
Graduating class size = 1 (unless you have twins)
AP and honors courses:
Just put how many your kid took. Or, if their older sibling took some different ones, you can include all the AP or honors courses your family has ever taken. Remember only courses officially certified by the CollegeBoard can be called AP classes.
Do you complete academic ratings: No.
Class rank: Exact.
GPA:
You can choose whether to include weighted or unweighted GPA here. I would generally lean towards weighted GPA, unless your student has a 3.8-4.0 unweighted or took very few honors, AP, or college classes.
Scale is normally 4.0.
That same GPA you write down is what you put for highest GPA in the class. (Unless, again, you have twins.)
Use dates from the start of your homeschool high school courses until your anticipated graduation date.
After certifying the "Profile" section, go on to "My Students." Click on the name of your student. Then on the near left, underneath "Student Info," pick "School Report."
Class Rank
List them as 1st, with zero students in their grade sharing that rank. (Unless, once again, twins... )
. Curriculum:
Comparison to other students:
This is not a very relevant question for homeschoolers, so just put what you think is best. Probably Most Demanding since there is just one of them in their grade – but it’s up to you. You could compare their curriculum to their siblings if you want.
IB/AICE/AP Capstone:
Most likely your student is not any of these.
AP Capstone does not mean they took AP classes. AP Capstone is a specific diploma program based on two year-long AP courses called AP Seminar and AP Research.
Transcripts:
Gather your files:
Whatever transcript you upload to Common App will be used for ALL the schools your student applies to. Normally you would include SAT/ACT scores on the transcript, but if there are some test-optional schools that you don't want to send scores to, maybe you should leave the scores off the transcript and send them separately to any schools you want to give them to.
Print your transcript, sign it, and scan it to PDF, with both pages in one document.
You should have a list of course descriptions for your student – many schools do request them. Save this as PDF as well.
If your student has an art portfolio, booklist, or other special documentation they want to submit to a school, gather those and make them into PDFs, too.
Number of official transcripts: If you want to include course descriptions as well as a transcript, choose 2 here. You can put down 3 or 4 if you have other things to upload, like a book list, community college transcript, or art portfolio.
Current courses on transcript: it's nice to include the student’s senior year courses on the transcript, without grades listed yet – in that case, this would be marked “yes.”
College entrance exams listed: This is referring to ACT and SAT.
Most recent grades included: If you listed senior year courses without any grades yet, then the answer to this question is final junior year grades.
Homeschool Section
"Please provide any information about the applicant's homeschool experience and environment that you believe would be helpful to the reader (e.g. educational philosophy, motivation for homeschooling, instruction setting, etc.)"
You have up to 1,000 words and can write this however you like.
Don’t include anything on grading scale; that’s in the next question.
You can cut and paste from your School Profile document for this section, or type "See School Profile," or enter additional information that's new, if you prefer.
“Please explain the grading scale or other methods of evaluation"
Here is a sample to adapt to match your own homeschool.
Depending on the course, grades are based on tests, quizzes, papers, projects, presentations, lab reports, participation, and homework completion. Grades are assigned by the primary instructor, who was often not the parent. Please see Course Descriptions for course-by-course specifics.
A+ 97-100 4.00
A 93-96 4.00
A- 90-92 3.67
B+ 87-89 3.33
B 83-86 3.00
B- 80-82 2.67
C+ 77-79 2.33
C 73-76 2.00
C- 70-72 1.67
D 65-69 1.00
F 0-69 0.00
P 0-100 N/A
Pass/Fail courses are not averaged into the GPA. (The student took only one pass/fail course.)
Weighted grades: for 1.0 credit courses, earn +0.5 quality points for honors classes and +1.0 quality points for AP/College classes.
"If the student has taken courses from a distance learning program, traditional secondary school, or college, please list course title, content, sponsoring institution, instruction setting, schedule, frequency of interactions with instructors and other students (once per day, week, etc.)” Also include any standardized tests the student has taken that are not listed on the Common App."
NOTE: the Common App entry box will remove all bold, italic, and indentation, so use capitalization and spacing to highlight separate sections.
From your Course Descriptions file, copy the courses that your student took outside the home or online.
You only have 1,000 words, which will be tight if your kid took very many courses outside the home. Cut and trim your course descriptions to fit. For example, you might need to cut out grading breakdowns, since they don’t ask for that here. You might also cut the authors of books (or even cut the books entirely if necessary). Trim, trim, trim. Clump courses together under the source, if you took multiple courses from one place – this saves words, too.
Don’t forget to include testing data, since they asked for that. List this first if it’s strong or at the end if it’s not.
Sample:
POTTERS SCHOOL:
AP-certified. Live, interactive, online group classes each meet twice weekly, 1.5 hrs/meeting
1) AP English Literature and Composition
Studies the ethical, moral, spiritual, and intellectual themes of great works in the Western literary canon from an AP-preparatory approach and a biblical worldview. Students consider great literature and literary characters in light of twelve major virtues that define a life set apart in Christian faith. Course includes mature college-level pacing, analysis, discussion and writing with a focus on addressing fiction, drama, and poetry in deep and sophisticated ways. Prerequisite: senior level English course.
o Antigone
o Macbeth
o Hamlet
o Lord of the Flies
o Of Mice and Men
o The Metamorphosis
o The Great Gatsby
o The House on Mango Street
o short stories & poetry
TESTING:
AP English Language (4), AP World History (3), SAT (650V/600M)), ACT (29).
Member of Homeschoolers Association?
You could list here if you are a member of HSLDA and/or your state organization (eg. HEAV or NCHE).
Write out the whole name instead of just the acronymns.
You could also list any homeschool co-ops or support groups you might be a member of. It’s okay to leave this blank if you aren’t a member of any of those groups.
DOUBLE CHECK BEFORE YOU SUBMIT!
There is a Preview feature so you can look it over.
Under certain circumstances you can edit your School Report after submission, but under other circumstances you can’t. So make sure it’s the way you want it before hitting Submit.
Counselor Recommendation (Yes, that’s you, the homeschool parent!)
This is the next item on the menu to the left.
How long have you known this student and in what context?
Parent and homeschool teacher, 18 years
Please provide comments that will help us differentiate this student from others. We especially welcome a broad-based assessment and encourage you to consider describing or addressing: · The applicant's academic, extracurricular, and personal characteristics. · Relevant context for the applicant's performance and involvement, such as particularities of family situation or after-school obligations, either positive or negative. · Observed problematic behaviors, perhaps separable from academic performance, that an admission committee should explore further.
Strictly speaking, the counselor recommendation is optional, but I wouldn’t skip it. This is a great opportunity to give your perspective on who your child is, their strengths, personality, learning style – anything that would be helpful for admissions to know which might not come through in the more standard parts of the application.
Did your student have heavy family or chore responsibilities? Did they hold down a job to help support the family? This is the place to mention it.
Remember the school can see the student’s activity list and transcript, so no need to reiterate items here.
The best recommendation letters tell stories rather than generalities or lists of adjectives. Can you think of specific anecdotes from your child’s life that illustrate the character/personality qualities you are mentioning? (Be careful not to go on too long or get too precious and gushy, though.)
This letter will be sent to every school they are applying to through Common App, so don’t make it school-specific.
Need more help? Check out Fearless Homeschoolers' article on Counselor Letters..
You have the option of uploading a letter or just using the text box.
I prefer a letter because it allows for better formatting, but it’s up to you.
You can make your own homeschool letterhead if you want, but not necessary.
If you decide to upload a file, then after writing it, print it off, sign it, and scan it in as a PDF. If it is multiple pages, make sure all the pages are in one PDF.
Whew! You made it!! Congratulations!!
Any questions? Other tips? Enter in comments below, or email!
Happy applying!
Missy
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