Home schooling is a unique learning experience that just 94 undergraduates shared before coming to Iowa State.

Katelyn Verhoef, freshman in pre-business and Gabe Johnson, freshman in genetics, are two of the 39 freshman at Iowa State who were home-schooled. They both said their lives were positively influenced by not attending a public or a private high school.

Verhoef and Johnson are both originally from Iowa, and both said home schooling adequately prepared them for college.

“It has made it easier to be disciplined and to direct my own studies,” Johnson said.

Dana North, Verhoef’s roommate and freshman in liberal arts and sciences-open option, said Verhoef’s hardworking attitude toward school work is definitely noticeable. “Katelyn is very thoughtful, energetic and hardworking,” North said. “She is pretty outgoing, and when I think of a home scholar, I don’t normally think of a person with Katelyn’s characteristics.”

Home schooling has not negatively impacted Verhoef’s social skills, despite the stereotypes that exist about home-schooled students, such as being sheltered and not fitting well into society, Verhoef said.

“These stereotypes come from people who haven’t met someone who is home-schooled,” she said.

Verhoef said she has a lot of friends here at college.

“I’m not complaining at all,” Verhoef said.

However, Johnson said, home schooling has had an effect on his social skills.

“It wasn’t so much I didn’t learn social skills; it was I didn’t learn teenage social skills,” Johnson said. “It is harder to find people like you.”

Verhoef said she met many lifelong friends in her hometown home-school group, Parental Education and Christian Encouragement.

Johnson and Verhoef were both initially home schooled because their parents wanted them to receive a Christian education without sending them to a private school.

Associate Director of Admissions Phil Caffrey said it is difficult to compare home-schooled students to students who attended public or private high schools, because they don’t have a GPA or class rank. Universities look solely at home-schooled students’ ACT scores, making the scores more important for admission.

“It isn’t like comparing apples to apples, it’s like comparing apples to oranges,” Caffrey said. “It’s only natural to assume home school students will enter college with higher ACT scores.”

The average ACT score of home scholars is 26.1, and the average of the rest of the incoming freshman and transfer students this year is 24.6, he said.

Verhoef said the ACT really isn’t the best measure to use for admissions because it only tests how well you can take the ACT. She said there really isn’t a good way to compare home-schooled students to students who attended a public or private school, although more emphasis should be put on letters of recommendations that home scholars provide when they apply for college.