<p>My problem with the Supplement is the assumption that home school students do (or should do) what all other students do, just in a different setting.
For some families this is true, but for others, including the people in my family, it just isn’t like that at all. We would hate to do “school at home”. That would be escaping from freedom. I have no interest in becoming my own children’s taskmaster (or jailer), or even in sub-contracting out the taskmaster job to others on occasion.
The Supplement’s transcript section asks for a list of course titles, dates, grades and level of courses. In our family their are no courses, we don’t keep track of dates (and my kids have listed none in their applications), grades were never given and level of course doesn’t apply because the term course doesn’t apply.
Does the supplement look like the college applications home schoolers have dealt with in the past? Yes.<br>
The difference is that my kids and I (in doing the School Report) proceeded to work around the categories that didn’t apply and explained what actually happened. I assumed that the reader would figure, “Well, these are home schoolers. Of course they do things differently”. The format of the Common Application Supplement pretty well demolishes that conceit.
This is just one more reinforcement of the idea that there is only a single legitimate form of education that will pass muster. The saddest result to me would be for home schoolers to feel they can’t buck the machine and get away with it and don’t, whenever possible, follow their bliss.
My first two home school college applicants were able to do it their way at no cost to their futures. My last home schooler is only 11, but I fully hope and expect that she will be able to as well.</p>