Blog

Have you ever struggled to document your students co-op classes? I’ve had a few questions lately from homeschool families who are struggling to do this very thing.

All co-ops have particular elements that make their classes unique and it can be hard to develop a class description for these classes when you weren’t the one teaching your student, but you want to make sure and get all of your students credits on their high school transcripts. I’ve gathered a few questions about co-op classes from a webinar we had and I hope they can help you in some fashion!

If co-op classes don’t issue a transcript, should you still list that as a separate class with a specific description of where they took the classes?

If you do list that, I would list it at the course description but not on the transcript. There is nothing wrong with putting it on the transcript if you choose to use a three-letter acronym; I just don’t think it adds too much, so it might be a cleaner-looking transcript if you leave that off and just put it on the course description.

Our co-op instructor teaching Speech 1 indicated that Speech is not considered an English class but a communication application class. Have you heard of this?

I have heard of that at the college level, but I would suggest to you that she may be over-thinking it.

One time, I met with a family and we talked about taking a computer science class. The dad said that I can’t call that computer science on the transcript since he’s a computer science major and he claims to know what it is. I told him that he’s not teaching it at a college level, but just at a high school level.

Usually, English Speech is considered an English class; I would put it under an elective. To call it a communication application class is unnecessary, so you can call it anything you want. If it’s in a co-op and it’s not with a school, you have all sorts of flexibility.

So what about when co-op classes are disguised? What about when the credit content seems illusive? Here’s a situation from a homeschool family who were going through that very dilemma.

My son took an AP Physics class from someone who has a PhD but the school  doesn't really have acronym to accompany it, how should I document that?

In that situation, that is like a homeschool class. It is simply a homeschool co-op class that happen to be online and the parent that taught that homeschool co-op class was a person that happen to have a PhD.

If they give you grades, you can take that under advisement, you might want defer to their judgment and use that grade, but you don’t have to submit those scores for the colleges where you apply because it’s not a school – it was just a homeschool class.

What is your experience with homeschool co-op classes and their documentation?