The central issue for us is the manner in which the student has gone about the learning process, not how many hurdles he or she has jumped. A n obvious difficulty home-schooled students face in the admission process is the lack of a conventional high school transcript. There is actually not a great deal of difference between someone with no formal grades or transcript and someone with excellent grades from a small, rural high school from which we have seen no other applicants. Grades are more meaningful when they help us distinguish between students in large high schools where there are known standards. Home schooling records lack a comparative context, of course.
W e look for a clear sense of intellectual growth and a quest for knowledge in our applicants.
Home-schooled students may have a potential advantage in this aspect of the application, since they have consciously chosen and pursued an independent course of study. In particular, we would like to hear in the written application about how the family chose home schooling, how the learning was organized, what benefits accrued, and what the experience cost in terms of lost opportunities. O verall, the home-schooled student's writing about his or her educational experience can play an even more central role in the application than it would for a conventional high school student. This kind of self-inquiry may be difficult for some students, because our society tends to discourage reflection about intellectual questions as opposed to vocational goals. Nevertheless, we strongly encourage an effort to analyze the experience, as much for the educational benefit of taking stock of oneself as for making a mark in the admission process.