Freshman Requirements & Process

Home-Schooled Applicant Guidelines

Home-schooled students, like all other students seeking undergraduate admission at Stanford, apply to Stanford using the Common Application. These additional guidelines may be helpful as you complete your application.

Academic Record

We generally expect that you have successfully undertaken a serious, rigorous course of study distributed across the humanities, sciences, math, social studies and languages. In addition to a transcript, we encourage you to submit a detailed description of your curriculum, but it is not necessary to follow a prescribed or approved home-schooling program. We are interested in how you have gone about the learning process, not how many courses you have completed.

In particular, we would like to understand:

• how and why your family chose home schooling
• how your learning process was organized
• what benefits accrued
• what, if any, choices you had to make to accomplish this type of education

Testing

The SAT or the ACT Plus Writing is the only exam required for the Stanford application; however, we welcome SAT Subject Test and/or Advanced Placement exam scores from home-schooled students as an additional measure of academic preparation. 

Evaluations

We require three letters of recommendation: two from teachers of the student's choice and one from a secondary school counselor. While a parent may write an evaluation in place of a secondary school counselor, we prefer that the teacher evaluations come from external instructors who have taught the student in an academic setting. Some examples include community college professors and online school instructors. 

Updated on July 16, 2015 4:00 PM