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I need help with some guide lines that I could follow to know what kind of a grade to give my son. We are using Res to Rev. He is in 10th grade.
We can get a discount on car insurance if he makes a certain letter grade. I THINK it's no lower than a B-. I will have to ask my husband for sure on that.
I want to be fair to him.
OR would you not recomment taking the discount and just paying the full cost of having him on our insurance when he gets his drivers license. ? Have any of you using HOD had this kind of situation?

I would think math and grammar would be easy to grade. The hard ones are history, science, and literature/writing. For history and science, you could always grade hour well he follows the instructions for notebooking and narrations. If you search the board, you should find some posts about rubrics that you can use for grading those. There are also many rubrics out there for writing that you could use to help justify grades. Some colleges may want to see grades, so personally I would try to assign them for high school.

I would look at the guidelines for the World Geography guide and try and base things on that. For many things it is a matter of did they follow directions, include everything they were supposed to and do their best work. I did make a rubric for written narrations but it doesn't grade content, only following directions and the checklist in the appendix. One thing make sure grades will work for the discount for homeschoolers. For my daughter they wouldn't take grades, she needed standardized test scores. We haven't tried it for my son yet so I don't know if the rules have changed or not.

Our insurance company used his standardized test scores. They don't accept homeschool grades. It is definitely worth the savings to get the discount though.

OH! I see! thanks for that info.
Now, here where we live, the school district does standard testing at certain grades. They don't test every year. His last test was at 8th grade and will be tested once more in 11th, a year from now in April. So, I wonder how that will work. I guess we will have to ask the insurance company. Will they accept the 8th grade test scores or will we have to wait until he's tested again in 11th.

You may have to give him a standardized test at home. I know there are several that State Farm will accept. They do have to score in something like the 80th percentile overall (top 20 percent).

So where do I find the tests? Our school district uses Stanford 10( Stanford achievement test)

Kidsforhim,

Our insurance company accepted a transcript that I made for my son through http://www.teascript.com. I just listed the courses for each year of his high school and listed the grade that he received. If your son is in ninth grade, you would only list ninth grade course titles. I used the free transcript service at the site I listed above,and then upgraded at the end to pay $10 or so to print the transcript without the teascript watermark. That is what we submitted to our insurance.

The website saves your transcript, so you can return to it and add to it each year if desired. I also used this for my oldest son's college requirements for a high school transcript when he graduated. The transcript has a place for standardized test scores if you decide to list those. Any field that you leave blank as you create the transcript will not print on your actual transcript. In place of the school name, I just put "High School Transcript." That way it said that at the top of the transcript. We haven't had any problems on any year with getting the discount for insurance when I submitted our son's transcript. So that may possibly work for you. I would try it, and then if they do not accept it you can worry about doing a standardized test. It is common to only do standardized testing in grade 11 in high school.

If you do go the standardized test route, you can get the Iowa Basics Skills Test or the Stanford Achievement Test through BJU, but you have to be approved as a tester first. I believe you must have proof of a college degree to be approved as a Stanford tester. I believe that you need a high school diploma to be an Iowa Basic Skills tester. We did the Iowa Test for years and years this way with our boys. You can get the CAT, the Iowa, or the Stanford Tests through Seton Homeschool. The CAT does not require you to be approved as a tester. Seton also offers an online version of the Stanford Test, where they administer the test for you as your child takes it on their own computer at home. The Stanford10 test was going to be retired, but it sounds like the retirement date has been moved. So, for now the Stanford10 is still available. We have done the CAT test through Seton as well with our boys.

Hope that helps!

Blessings,
Carrie

Thank you Carrie, that was very helpful!
Now, if I can go the transcript route, I still need to know how do I evaluate Res to ref to give a grade?? I am totally lost!! We have dial-up for internet so searching online is a BIG time thing and we live 25 miles from a library.
For the standardized test route, does someone else grade the tests if we get the one we can administer or does it come with score key of some kind.?

I'm beginning to feel overwhelmed and wishing they were in school ( private)

You just send the standardized test back to the company you ordered it from and they grade it and send you a detailed report.

Something doesn't seem right.... I call insurance co. and they say that they need standard achievement test scores and then gives me a list PSAT, Plan, Sat-I, ACT, TAP, ITED.
I call school distict and they say that they send in report card of students grades. They also said that our state only gives the standardized tests at 11th grade in high school. The SAT and ACT are not given until the child is closer to graduation.

Our insurance is the same way. They will take report cards for ps, private schools etc, but not from a homeschool student. We have State Farm and I am pretty sure that is their national policy. The ITED is the Iowa test. It just has those initials at the high school level. You can order that through Seton testing.

They called back. There was some confusion on both sides. They have 3 discount programs that you can use. The good student program required the standerdized test score and is used by high schoolers and college students. Then they have a Steer Clear program for young drivers ( which is what we will most likely go with) and a Driver Training discount for those who take Drivers Ed. ( we could also do this along with the other if we want). I asked about needing grades for the Steer Clear program and they aren't required.
NOW to figured out HOW to grade the work he's doing in this guide......

I made a rubric for each box assigning points to different aspects of the box until it totaled 100 points. Then I grade on the Rubric.

mrsrandolph, I sent you a PM