The Common App School Report, field by field, for a homeschool

Every field, in the order the form asks them, answered for a school with one student. Free and complete. Every factual claim here is quoted from the form itself, from Common App, from College Board, or from a college's own admissions page, and the source is shown.

Before the fields: what this document is

The School Report is the form your student's counselor fills in. You are the counselor. Common App calls the role home school supervisor, and the student invites you into it from their own application.

Most of the form was written for a school with several hundred students. You have one. That is not a problem to hide and it is not something admissions readers are unfamiliar with. It does mean about a dozen fields need a decision rather than a fact, and a wrong instinct on any of them makes an honest parent look evasive or boastful.

This guide takes them one at a time.

It is not legal or admissions advice, and requirements change. Verify anything that matters against the current form and the colleges your student is applying to.

Counselor details

Title. Use Home School Supervisor. It is Common App's own term for the role, it matches how the student invited you, and it tells the reader exactly what relationship produced this form. Avoid titles that imply an institution you do not have, such as Principal or Head of School.

Profile URL. This field expects a link to your school profile. Most homeschools leave it blank. Put a link here. Host your one-page profile as a PDF anywhere stable and paste the address. Common App's own guidance tells counselors to publish the profile on the school website with a file name that is easy to search for, and a reader who wants context will look.

School details

School name. Use the same name on the transcript, the profile and this form. Pick something plain that describes what it is. Avoid names that suggest accreditation you do not hold, which is the one thing here that can actually damage you.

CEEB code: 970000.

Homeschools do not get an individual code. College Board publishes one code for all of them, and its BigFuture help center states it plainly: "The high school code for all homeschoolers is 970000." Its SAT Suite help center gives the same instruction: "Enter 970000 as the high school code."

Use it on the School Report, on test registrations, and anywhere else an application asks for a high school code. Do not invent a code and do not leave the field blank.

A related code worth knowing: a school that has no code of its own uses 000003 inside the United States and its territories, or 000004 outside. Neither applies to a homeschool, which has 970000.

Website. The same address as the profile URL, if you have one.

The school profile section

When are mid-year grades typically available. You decide this and then you honor it. Put the date you actually finish and record first-semester work. A real date you meet is worth more than an impressive one you miss.

Graduating class size. Write the number. If one student is graduating, write 1.

Parents freeze here and the instinct is to find a bigger number by counting a co-op or a support group. Do not. The reader already knows what a homeschool is, the number is not a judgment, and inflating the one field that is trivially checkable against everything else on the form is the fastest way to lose the reader's trust.

The percentages of the graduating class. Thirteen of them: attending two-year and four-year college, six race and ethnicity lines, first-generation, citizenship, free or reduced lunch, financial aid.

With one student every answer is 0 or 100. That is arithmetic rather than achievement, and a reader who sees a class size of 1 above will read it that way. Answer them literally, or leave them blank where your student's situation makes an answer meaningless. What you should not do is report 100 percent college-going as though it were an outcome. It describes one person, and the school profile is where the reader learns what your program actually is.

School setting. Rural, suburban or urban. Answer for where you live.

How many AP, IB, Honors and Cambridge courses your school offers. Count the ones you actually made available, not the ones that exist in a catalog you looked at.

If you designated a course "Honors" yourself, that is a weighting decision and it belongs in your grading policy on the profile and in the transcript legend. Designating your own Honors courses is normal and defensible. Doing it without disclosing the standard you used is what reads badly.

Any policy limit on courses per year. Most homeschools have none. Leave it blank or say so.

Block schedule. Usually no.

Graduation date. The date you set. It goes on the transcript and the diploma too, so set it once.

Located outside the United States. Usually no.

Required volunteer service. Most homeschools require none. If yours genuinely did, describe what was required rather than what the student happened to do.

Class rank

How do you report class rank: Exact, Decile, Quintile, Quartile, or None.

Choose None.

The form provides that option and most parents never notice it, then labor over ranking one child. A rank of 1 out of 1 is not information, and reporting it invites a reader to wonder what you thought it proved. Selecting None also makes the next two fields, the student's rank and how many others share it, fall away.

GPA

Do you report GPA. The form tells you that answering no ends the section.

Report it. The alternative leaves a reader to infer performance from a transcript whose grading standard they do not know, and that is worse than a self-reported number you explain clearly.

Cumulative GPA, scale, date range and weighting. Give the number, state the scale, and say plainly whether it is weighted. If you weight, the profile and the legend must say by how much and for which courses. An unexplained weighted GPA above 4.0 is the single most common thing that makes a parent-issued transcript look inflated.

School's passing mark. The lowest grade you counted as passing. Answer it honestly even if it is lower than you would like; it is context, not a verdict.

Highest grade or GPA in class. With one student this is your own child's GPA, and writing it feels absurd.

Write it anyway. Leaving it blank while filling in everything around it reads as avoidance. A reader who has already seen a class size of 1 understands what the number means. The awkwardness is structural and it is not yours to fix by hiding a field.

Curriculum

"In comparison with other college preparatory students at your school, the student's course selection is:" Less than demanding, Average, Demanding, Very demanding, Most demanding, or Prefer not to respond.

Prefer not to respond is available and it is the honest answer when there is no comparison group.

You may instead answer against the program you designed, and some parents do. Either is defensible. What is not defensible is Most demanding with a class of one, which compares a student to himself and tells the reader only that you were willing to say it.

If you want this question answered with weight behind it, the answer belongs to somebody else: a dual enrollment instructor, a co-op teacher, an outside evaluator. That is what an additional recommendation is for.

Ratings

The block asking how you rate the student compared to others in their class, across academic achievements, extracurricular accomplishments, personal qualities and character, and overall. The scale runs from No basis to "One of the top few encountered in my career."

This is the hardest part of the form and it is where honest parents do themselves the most damage.

Separate two things the form deliberately keeps apart.

The comparative ratings measure your student against a class. You do not have one. No basis is a truthful answer and it is not a weak one. It reports a structural fact about a school with one student, and a reader who has seen the class size understands it immediately. If you do have a real comparison group, a co-op you taught, students you tutored, an outside class, then rate against that group and be ready for your recommendation letter to say so.

"One of the top few encountered in my career" is a claim about your career. If you have taught one student, you have no career-length distribution to place them in. Selecting it does not raise the reader's estimate of your child. It lowers their estimate of the form.

The recommendation strength at the end of the form is where your enthusiasm belongs, and it is the field a parent is genuinely qualified to answer.

Additional information

Five hundred words for adjustments due to community disruptions, with grading scales, graduation requirements, instructional methods, schedules and course offerings, testing requirements and the academic calendar named as what colleges want to understand.

Leave it blank unless something real happened. It is not a place to make your case for the student, and using it that way tells the reader you had space to fill.

If something did happen, an illness, a move, a year that changed shape, describe what changed about the schooling rather than how hard it was.

Summary

Which grades the transcript includes. Tick the accurate box. It must match what you actually attached.

"I recommend this student:" No basis, With reservation, Fairly strongly, Strongly, Enthusiastically.

Enthusiastically. You are the parent, the reader knows you are the parent, and they discount for it automatically. Understating here to appear objective does not buy credibility, it just removes the one piece of information you were asked for. The objectivity you can actually offer is in the fields above, where you declined to rank one child first and declined to call him the best you have ever seen.

Signature and date. Sign it. A parent-issued transcript with no signature is the one document defect that is entirely avoidable.

Which college are you writing for

The four admissions pages we read do not agree with each other.

Lafayette College asks for year ordering, type of instruction on every course, and a separate course description document. Colorado College asks for none of that and will accept portfolios and work samples in place of a transcript altogether. MIT and Georgia Tech prescribe no format at all.

You cannot guess which of those your student's list resembles, and most parents never read any of these pages.

So build to the strictest one. A transcript in year order carrying type of instruction, with a legend, a course description document and a one-page profile, satisfies the most demanding requirement we found and is comfortably more than the others ask for. Doing it once covers the paperwork for the whole list.

Paperwork is not the only bar, and at public universities it is often not the bar that decides. The University of Georgia requires an applicant from a non-accredited home study program to "demonstrate their academic ability through standardized test scores and/or accredited course work", and names what counts: SAT or ACT, IB or AP exams, or coursework for credit that appears on an official college or accredited high school transcript. No transcript, however well built, answers that.

Public flagships have also been reinstating test requirements, among them Texas A&M, UT Austin, Florida, Georgia, Auburn, LSU and Purdue.

So do both. Build the documents, and get some of your student's work assessed by somebody who is not you, through a dual enrollment course or an AP or IB exam. That is the same thing this guide says about the ratings block and about the recommendation letter, and it is what makes every document you produce yourself more credible.

One transcript field worth checking against your own list. Ohio University asks a homeschool transcript to include "the date range (month / year) of when each course was taken". Grouping courses under Grade 9 through 12 does not answer that, so carry the months as well.

What goes with this form

The School Report says to attach the transcript, including courses in progress and a transcript legend, and that the school profile is optional.

• The transcript, ordered by year rather than by subject. Lafayette College publishes this outright, telling homeschooled applicants to "list the courses in year order versus by subject matter."

Lafayette also asks the transcript to report every academic course from ninth through twelfth grade with "course name, credit and grade as well as the type of instruction (online, local college, co-op, tutorial, etc)."

Add the type-of-instruction column. Almost no parent-built transcript has one, and it does quiet work: a transcript showing which courses were taught by a community college or an outside instructor makes its own case without you claiming anything.

• A course description document. Lafayette requires one, "describing the academic courses completed during the previous three years and the current course work." Several other colleges accept one without asking. It is the cheapest credibility you can add.
• The transcript legend, explaining your grading scale, what a credit means in your school, and how weighting works if you weight. Named on the form and almost nobody sends one.
• The school profile, one to two pages. The form calls it optional: counselors "have the option to attach a school profile." Send one anyway.

Common App's own guidance, in Developing a school profile, says this:

"70%+ of applications submitted through Common App have a school profile attached from a counselor or school official. Applications that don't include a school profile are more likely to come from students attending small, charter, new, or rural schools."

Common App does not say homeschools. It says small, charter, new, and rural. Draw your own conclusion about which category a school with one student and no history sits closest to. What is not in dispute is that most applications carry a profile, so a reader who does not get one is missing context they usually have.

The same document sets the shape: one to two pages, bullet points and charts over paragraphs, updated yearly, and published somewhere with a file name that is easy to find.

The other form: the Home School Supplement

The School Report is not the only Common App form with your name on it. There is a separate one-page form called the Home School Supplement, and most parents never learn it exists.

It has a student section and a homeschool supervisor section. If you are already listed as the counselor on the School Report and you attach the supplement to it, the form tells you that you can leave the supervisor block blank. Like the School Report, it goes directly to each college admission office rather than to Common App. Whether a given college wants it is not something the form says, so ask the ones on your student's list.

It asks whether you belong to a homeschooler's association, and for the name if you do.

Then it asks for three written explanations, each capped at 1000 words:

1. The student's homeschool experience and environment. The form gives educational philosophy, motivation for homeschooling, and instruction setting as its examples. 2. Your grading scale, or whatever other method of evaluation you used. 3. Every course taken through a distance learning program, a traditional secondary school, or a college. For each one it wants the course title, the content, the sponsoring institution, the instruction setting, the schedule, and how often the student interacted with instructors and other students. It also asks for standardized tests the student has taken that are not listed on the Common App.

Two of those three you have already written.

Question 2 is the transcript legend in prose. If your legend states your scale, what a credit means in your school and how weighting works, the answer is sitting in that document.

Question 3 is the type-of-instruction column, expanded. A transcript that records which courses came from a community college or an outside instructor already holds the list. The supplement asks you to describe the setting and the contact rather than only name them.

A thousand words is a ceiling and not a target. The instinct to fill it is the same instinct that ruins the ratings block, and a reader working through an application does not reward length.

Question 1 is where the temptation to defend homeschooling lives. The reader is not asking you to justify the decision, and an answer that argues for it reads as though the decision needed arguing. Describe what the schooling actually looked like: who taught what, where the work happened, how a week was structured, and what changed as the student got older.

Read from the published Home School Supplement form. The copy available to us is dated 2022, so check the current one before you rely on the exact wording.

Checked against the Common App school report form dated 2025-26. A guide to a form is wrong the day the form moves, so this line says when it was last read.