Home school Records - My Experience in Creating Home school Records

course description.
I had never seen a home school course description and I didn't know what it looked like. I only understood I was required to do it yet I didn't know how. I dealt with that stress the way I typically do - I researched. About the time my kids were in about 6th grade, I began doing research. Whenever I attended a convention to buy curriculum for my children, I also bought a book for myself concerning ways to home school high school.
In all my research I learned that noone agreed on the right way to do course descriptions. That was really concerning to me. They were applying words such as voice, person, tense, verb tense. I hadn't considered these kinds of things since high school. Because of this, I had no idea what I was expected to do. I only knew that course descriptions were in places like college catalogs and online, and that they seemed frightening. I realized that I had better take my research to the next level so I questioned the actual experts.

The real experts were home school moms who were older than me, who had undertaken the task, gotten their kids into colleges, and had gotten good scholarships. I asked them how they created their home school records.
After that, I spoke to colleges. Whenever I visited a college, whether it was for a college fair or a visit, I always questioned them what they wished to see in school records. I found the whole body of information that I got from this research very interesting.
One of the things that I discovered was that colleges really just desired details. Once we were visiting a college and I showed them a one-page description of an English course that I had done and I showed it to the admissions person. I told them that I had this type of information for all the courses that we had completed in our home school. I asked them if this was excessive or not enough, and if it was the data that they desired and exactly how they desired it.
It was interesting because this college admissions person said that she loved it and it was exactly what she wanted. She said that she wished all of the public school kids were required to write course descriptions just like it. She was so discouraged with the state of public education because kids would come to college and their transcript would claim English 1, 2, 3, 4 but actually could not read and write. She had a difficult time comprehending exactly how it could state one thing on their transcript and yet they aren't working at that level. She had no idea what they were teaching them in high school English and she wished that she had this quality of information from all of the kids that applied, not only from home schoolers.
I found that encouraging on many different levels. It was nice to realize that we stacked up quite well with our peers. But it really said to me that more records were more desirable and to really give them what they wanted.