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Homeschool Documentation and Work Samples

Keeping Records

Monday, 14 April 2025

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It is important to provide colleges with the information they need when going through the college admission process. Although the transcript may be the cornerstone of admission, colleges may ask for you to provide homeschool documentation in the way of work samples if they are considering your student for scholarship opportunities. Having your comprehensive records in order is important before you begin the college admission process.

Comprehensive Records and Homeschool Documentation

Comprehensive Records - the dessert of your homeschooling journey! The icing on the cake, if you will.

College admissions is a high stakes business now and homeschool parents often feel ill-equipped to compete with public and private schools in gaining admission and scholarships. But, with comprehensive records you can compete! How can you document your records so that colleges can quickly and accurately identify your student as the real deal?

A comprehensive record is your homeschool documentation, organized in a neat, easily digestible format that colleges will understand and appreciate.

It can include your:
• Homeschool transcript
• Course descriptions
• Reading list
• Awards and activity list
• Samples of work

The finished product will be authoritative portfolio documenting your student's education.

This portfolio of records can make the difference between not getting admitted at all, and getting admitted AND getting big scholarships! Lee Binz, the founder of The HomeScholar experienced this firsthand. Making this portfolio and making it excellent is well worth the effort.

Work Samples Colleges Might Request

Some colleges will want samples of work, and other colleges will not. When a college asks for work samples, they may not all want the same sort of thing. In the colleges that we applied to, one wanted a written lab report from science, another wanted a math paper in the student handwriting, and a couple of colleges wanted a graded English paper. Other colleges may request a sample from other subjects. None of our colleges specified that the work samples had to be from senior year.

In the past, some of my consulting clients have been asked for some pretty strange things when their students were applying for admission. One college asked for their transcripts in a sealed envelope, signed on the outside by the principal. Another asked for transcripts from a 'recognized homeschool agency' (what is that?!). One client was asked for a "graded" English paper, so she printed a completed essay, added grading marks and corrections, and sent it off.

A lot of colleges, though, want homeschool documentation in the form of samples of a student's homeschool work. At least this is a reasonable, and quite common, request.

How to Stay Organized

To make sure that you have any work samples that may be required, it can help to be a little bit organized. I kept a binder with a tab for each subject. I tried to collect work samples in every subject. My goal was to have a few work samples in every subject that was listed in the transcript "just in case." I figured that no matter how many colleges we applied to, even if they all asked for exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, I would still have enough work samples for everyone.

If you haven't kept work samples all along in high school, then it's fine to provide them just from senior year. If you are applying to college early in the fall, then you can always create any necessary work samples that may be required ("Honey, you need to do a lab report this week, because the college needs one.") If you have kept work samples from every year of high school, then use the BEST work sample you can provide. In other words, give them the scholarship-winning essay, not the one that has red corrections all over it, and give them their best math test from their best math year, not the most recent test when they were distracted by other things.

Just remember, you can choose to save the BEST math test and the BEST English paper, but not everything!

Grading and Course Descriptions

I suggest that you keep course descriptions as you go, updating them each year, so that you have a record of your curriculum and class experiences. A course description can have three distinct parts:

A paragraph about what you did, perhaps from the curriculum manufacturer, online class description, or my Comprehensive Record Solution.
A list of what you used, including textbooks, supplements, experiences, and field trips.
A description of how you evaluated, listing tests, quizzes, papers, projects, discussion, or other non-test assessments.

Keep samples of work in a notebook, in case colleges ask for a sample. It's unlikely they will ask, but those samples can add some feeling of security. Better safe than sorry! Plus, saving these samples can help you describe the details your grading criteria.

Did you catch earlier that I said I saved a sample of work for each class on the transcript? It's important to have those, even though I didn't send those directly to colleges (I figured maybe they didn't actually prefer documentation of four years of PE, you know? That could get lengthy!) Instead, I made a note on each course description about how "written work is available upon request." In the event that they asked me for something, I ended up being able to give it to them.

More Resources

I have two free classes that will be a big help for parents:

This free class will explain a LOT about documentation: Homeschool Records that Open Doors (Harvest Party Theme)

This free class will explain about how to determine grades: A Homeschool Parent's Guide to Grades, Credits and Transcripts

If you'd like an example of the documentation records mentioned in this post, check out my Homeschool Transcript Template and Record Keeping Samples here!