The USFA announced their Academic All American program today. Recognizing high school age fencers that are excelling academically is an admirable goal. Surprisingly, they even included homeschooolers.

From the FAQ:
I’m home schooled or attending a non-traditional school. Can I still qualify for this program?

Absolutely. Your grades, converted to a 4.0-scale GPA, must be reported as a part of the application process.

From the application.
Home schooled athletes must provide documentation from an accredited organization overseeing the high school athlete verifying his GPA if no seal is available.

Grades? What are these grades they speak of?

To be fair to the USFA, I’m guessing to them, a homeschooler is somebody that was in school until they made the world travel team, and now they are doing some sort of correspondence course because they are traveling the world fencing for the US. Those kids will have grades. There are probably 10 of them in the USFA. There are probably a few hundred “traditional” homeschoolers that will not have grades to provide for the All American Program.

I don’t necessarily have an answer for them. However, I have emailed the person in charge and pointed out the problem, and offered my help. So homeschoolers, how does a homeschooled high school student with no grades take part in this program, fairly. It’s not fair to the kids in school being judged by the government to allow the HS parents to make up grades. I’m thinking they should have an alternative test based path that would also apply to the school kids. So it would be have a 3.5 GPA, or score in the 90 percentile (or whatever) of the CAT, PSAT, SAT, etc. Obviously this won’t please the anti-testing crowd, but what are you going to do? It a program built around measuring academic success with numbers. Whether or not that is a good idea is not the issue here.