One of the primary goals of a proficiency-based grading system is to produce grades that more accurately reflect a student’s learning progress and achievement, including situations in which students struggled early on in a semester or school year, but then put in the effort and hard work needed to meet expected standards. If you ask nearly any adult, they will tell you that failures—and learning to overcome them—are often among the most important lessons in life.
Secondary-school transcripts serve as the official academic record for high school graduates, as well as other students who attended a school but did not earn a diploma. The Great Schools Partnership consulted with secondary administrators and college-admissions professionals to develop an exemplar transcript that balances the pedagogical principles of proficiency-based learning with the need to clearly communicate academic accomplishment to colleges, employers, recruiters, and others. While the creation of customized academic records may be complicated by the idiosyncrasies of a school’s student-information and grade-reporting systems, our exemplar transcript is intended to serve as a point of discussion and departure for schools looking to develop their own proficiency-based transcripts or adapt their transcript process to serve the distinct needs of a proficiency-based system. The Great School Partnership’s exemplar transcript captures a variety of student learning experiences, including academic courses, internships, independent studies, and dual-enrollment opportunities. The level of proficiency earned, the duration of the learning experience, and the school year are also recorded, along with a student’s cumulative grade-point average, any Latin honors earned, and a summary of performance on both content-area and cross-curricular graduation standards. Importantly, we recommend that schools include all necessary explanatory information that colleges, employers, recruiters, and others will need to interpret and fully understand the transcript.
For additional guidance and recommendations, see our exemplar transcript policy (.doc).
→ Download Exemplar High School Transcript (.pdf)
Proficiency-Based Learning Simplified by Great Schools Partnership is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.