How to write course descriptions admissions officers accept

This is the part of a homeschool application that takes twenty hours and gets started three days before the deadline. It is also the part that does the most work for your student, because it is where "Biology" stops being a word on a grid and becomes a course an admissions officer can evaluate.

What each description has to do

A course description answers four questions in a short paragraph:

  1. What was covered? The actual topics, in the order they were studied.
  2. What did the student use? Texts, curricula, lab kits, online courses, primary sources — named specifically. "Apologia Biology, 2nd edition" carries weight; "a biology textbook" does not.
  3. What did the student do? Labs, essays, problem sets, projects, performances, field work.
  4. How was it assessed? Exams, graded papers, portfolio review, an outside evaluator, a CLEP or AP score.

How long, and how many

One paragraph per course — roughly 80 to 150 words. Every course on the transcript gets one, which for a four-year record usually means 20 to 28 descriptions gathered into a single document, organized by year and subject, with the student's name on every page.

A worked example

Biology with Lab — 1.0 credit — Grade 9 — A (94)

A full-year survey of cellular biology, genetics, human anatomy, ecology, and classification, following Apologia Exploring Creation with Biology (2nd ed.) with supplementary reading from Carl Zimmer's Microcosm. Laboratory work comprised sixteen experiments from the accompanying lab manual, including microscopy, dissection of a fetal pig, and a four-week local pond ecology study with weekly sampling. Assessment was by twelve chapter examinations, a written lab report for each experiment, and a final cumulative exam. Grade reflects the weighted average of exams (60%) and lab reports (40%).

Notice what makes it credible: named texts, a count of labs, a specific project, and a stated grading basis. None of that is embellishment — it is simply what happened, written down.

The honesty rule

Write only what your student actually did. A description that invents a text or a lab is both easy to spot and disqualifying, and it puts your student's integrity at issue over something that was never necessary. If a course was reading and discussion, say that plainly — a well-described discussion course reads better than a fabricated laboratory.

It is the reason our generator will never invent a resource: if you did not enter a text for a course, the description says so and marks it for you to complete. We would rather hand you a gap to fill than a sentence you cannot defend.

The fast way

Enter each course with its topics, texts and assessment method, and we write the descriptions in your voice — plus the transcript, school profile and counselor letter that go with them. $99 for the complete pack.

Build my student's pack What the transcript must contain →

Document preparation for your own homeschool records — not admissions advice.