The Mastery Transcript Consortium was founded on March 1, 2017 by Scott Looney, head of Hawken School in Northeast Ohio.

[1][2] The creation of the Mastery Transcript was inspired by Looney's desire to create a new model for education in which learning was connected to real-world issues and students could demonstrate a broader range of abilities to colleges; the idea for the Mastery Transcript came when a parent of a Hawken student approached Looney after a presentation and mentioned that the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, at which he was a faculty member, did not give grades but instead evaluated students' competency in various areas based on an electronic portfolio of their work.

[6] The design of the Mastery Transcript is based on three core concepts: flexibility to accommodate a variety of school curricula, the omission of letter grades, and a format which can be read by college admissions officers in under two minutes.

[7] The transcript takes the form of a landing page on which credits earned by students are displayed in a graphic which an article in The Washington Post Magazine compared to the seating plan for a theatre in the round.

The Washington Post Magazine reported that the eligibility staff of the National Collegiate Athletic Association planned to work with schools sending mastery transcripts to convert them into equivalencies for courses and grades.