What Your Transcript Says
By Sherri Gilmore, Director of Admissions
Your high school transcript is the record of your academic coursework throughout high school. Is that all it is? Does it tell your admission’s counselor more? It sure does!
When your high school transcript first arrives, your admissions counselor looks at your high school. We scour the profile of your school that comes with your transcript and we often research your school online as well. What we are looking to determine is:
- What type of high school did you attend?
- What types of courses were made available to you?
- What curriculum did you choose to challenge yourself academically?
Once we have learned more about your school and its offerings, we then look at your academic record.
As part of our review here at Norwich, we analyze your transcript and recalculate your academic GPA and your overall GPA. We do this because all schools are different - some weight classes while others do not. So manned with our highlighters we cruise through your transcript highlighting your Math, English, History, Science and Foreign Language classes. We then calculate these as your academic GPA. We go back through your transcript and add in the remaining elective coursework to recalculate your overall GPA.
What we can learn about you from your transcript doesn’t stop at your GPA though! Your counselor will then look at your overall report to see how you preformed from year-to-year.
- Did you start out slow but came on strong as the years went on?
- Does your transcript in some ways resemble a roller coaster – going up and down from year to year?
- Are you strong and steady, maintaining your grades from year-to-year?
- Does something jump out from your transcript – a quarter, semester, or even year that doesn’t seem to fit in with your overall high school career?
We encourage you to tell us more about your academic record. If you experienced a difficult quarter, semester or year, tell us what happened and why, if you have particular trouble with a subject area, tell us how you addressed your need for help in that area, etc.
Be sure to send along your quarterly report cards as well to help strengthen your file. When you graduate, you also need to send us your official high school transcript, signed and sealed to show proof of your graduation.
We look forward to reviewing your transcript as part of your application packet for Norwich University. Your admissions counselor is happy to work with you and your high school guidance counselor to make this part of the process an easy one!
