Why Generic Courses Aren’t Great for College Admissions. What makes a transcript college attractive? Not with generic courses. Here’s what to do about it.
Why Generic Courses Aren’t Great for College Admissions
What are generic courses? Why are they not great on a homeschool high school transcript?
Generic courses are core courses that are nondescript courses that many high schoolers take. Have you seen transcripts that look like this?
10th Grade:
- Language Arts
- World History
- Health
- Consumer Math
- and so on….
Why is this not so great on a homeschool high school transcript?
If your homeschool high schooler applies to a large college (like many state colleges), admissions officers have a minute or maybe as many as 5 minutes to cover the entire application for each student.
Can you imagine what that job is like? What if 700 of the 800 applications you view in a day look exactly the same? What makes a student stand out?
One way is to include courses that are NOT generic. Some college admissions officers call them “sparkle” or “pop” courses.
Let’s look at that same 10th grade year with sparkle courses:
10th Grade:
- World Literature
- History and Philosophy of the Western World
- Human Development
- Financial Literacy
These courses tell the admissions officer more about your homeschool high schooler:
- World Literature tells the officer that your teen is able to dive in-depth into a subject.
- History and Philosophy of the Western World tells the officer that your teen is a thinker, prepared to wrestle with ideas- definitely college material.
- Human Development tells the officer that your teen can choose courses creatively.
- Financial Literacy tells the officer that your teen won’t simply aim for the bare minimum but work for personal development in his/her education.
That’s one reason why 7Sisters Homeschool has developed the courses we offer. After speaking to numerous college admissions officers over the years, we found that the transcript is one way to give our homeschool high schoolers the edge over their competition for college acceptance.
Sparkle up your transcript with some of 7Sisters sparkle courses for the core classes!
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