No matter how long you have been homeschooling or even if you are a new homeschooler, we always want to know and understand how to calculate homeschool grades.
Homeschool grades are necessary for our kids especially if they want to get into a really college. But guess what most parents don’t know how to calculate homeschool grades!
Don’t worry in this article we are going to go over how to calculate your child’s GPA.
Homeschoolers must update the child’s transcript yearly. After updating the transcript, you’ll need to calculate your GPA. Here where your sweating work starts.
Why Do You Need Grades?
If you want to show the competence and abilities of your children to good colleges and universities, you’ll need to assign grades.
Do grades also show how parents are doing with their child’s education in the homeschool? It’s the only place where our efforts are evaluated. Calculating GPA is the way to measure how your child is performing in your homeschool.
We always consider grades to represent our child’s competency, but that’s not true. Always remember to never consider grades as mastery!
What’s learned can be forgotten within a couple of months, but creativity, imagination, curiosity remains forever. Teach your kids that!
How To Calculate a GPA or Grades for Homeschoolers?
Every school sets its own rules and regulations to calculate GPA and weight class performance of each child. As a homeschooler, you have to decide your policies to calculate grades.
Make it simple and sensible. Because adopting a complex method won’t show any different results. Choosing a simple way of calculating homeschool grades is always helpful to save your sanity and time.
First, Calculate high school credits.
You can make calculating grades as easy as getting a massage or eating ice cream peacefully. My small tricks will help you to become more confident about homeschooling.
You can measure the credits by homeschool curriculum. Each textbook refers to one high school credit, and each semester class is a half credit. If you’re not willing to use a pre-measured homeschool curriculum, then you can measure it in hours.
- One credit: 120-180 hours that equals an hour a day
- Half credit: 60-90 hours equals half an hour a day
You can give extra credits for high school education irrespective of the student’s age. For example, your middle-school child can earn extra credit in Algebra or higher school biology and other higher foreign languages.
No doubt, children can earn high school credits if they show college-level performance at any age.
Tips for calculating homeschool GPA
A straightforward way to calculate the homeschool grade point average (GPA) is to take all the tests and assignments together and take the average score. Below are some factors that help you to calculate grades:
- Set a credit value for each class.
- Also, set a numerical grade for each class
- Then multiply each credit by numerical grades, and you’ll get the grade point for that particular class
- After completing all the courses, add all the grade points
- Divide all grade points with numerical credits
- You can see the exact grade point average(Gpa)
That’s all; further, I listed a few factors that would help you to calculate homeschool grades without any anxiety and tiredness.
Mastery doesn’t mean 100 out of 100
All students can’t make 100’s in all subjects. It’s possible in a reputed school to get a chance to score 100’s after retaking tests. But homeschooling can be a challenging task for children!
I know parents wish their kids to get mastery.
The only magic to get promising results is through retrying. For example, take a test three times on any particular assignment. Then calculate the scores and try to sum up an average of all three tests for the final grade.
“A” for effort grade does not describe the accurate reflection of the kids’ accomplishments. Your kids can learn extra languages and different subjects apart from the curriculum and can earn effort grades.
Although these grades do not account for the final results, they still hype your kid’s marksheet.
If your child crosses 100% accuracy and competency on the marksheet and it still doesn’t reflect your child’s ability, you can use effort grades to further describe his/her work.
Mostly, we use the Uniform Grade Scale set by the Department of Ed for SC; 100 is the highest grade. If your student is doing above or below 100s level, it is considered the weight of honour.
Set Goals and Objectives
You can set a list of objectives in subjects that can help students to master. A few goals also can be placed in a project like:-
- zero grammar mistakes in a paper mean an A grade.
- Upto 4 to 6 mistakes-B grade
- 6 to 10 mistakes-C grade
- And over ten means redo the same test
Consider it as a Resume.
When your resume shows that you’re proficient in a particular area, you have to back it up. You can learn the courses and credits from real life. So, you might not need any tests and projects for grading along the way.
You must always be accurate. Instead of saying that you’re a master in a subject, you’re rewarded with a grade of A.
According to SC, A is designated a number between 90-100%. If the student scores B, its value is between 80-90%. But for a novice student, C is good. That’s designated the number from 70-79. I think it would be rare to earn below a C in homeschool.
Check out this post The Beginner’s Guide to Homeschooling as A Full-time Working Mom
End Point
Without revision, knowledge is a vessel with many holes. Before evaluating what’s to grade or not to grade in your homeschool, you have to set objectives and goals towards mastery. As a homeschool parent, only you’re responsible for assigning the GPA.