Alberta cancels January provincial exams due to time lost during teachers strike

High school students in Alberta will not be writing their provincial diploma exams in January, but can take them in April or June if they choose. 

Alberta Education made the announcement Friday afternoon. Students, parents and teachers have wondered what the province would do about the exams after students lost three weeks of course work due to a teachers strike. 

The province is also cancelling provincial achievement tests for Grade 9 students. 

Course marks for students who choose not to write their January diploma exams will come entirely from school work.

Those students will get a notation on their transcript saying the exam was not written. The province says this won’t hurt a student’s prospects for admission into university or college programs nor will it hurt their ability to graduate.

Teachers represented by the Alberta Teachers' Association were on strike from Oct. 6 until they were ordered back to work on Wednesday by provincial legislation. 

Jason Schilling, president of the ATA, said cancelling the January exams would be a good decision for the province to make.

"Kids shouldn't be — similar to what we saw during COVID — punished for something else that was out of their control," he said.

The province initially put up a news release about a cancellation of January's exams on Thursday before quickly taking it down. Schilling said he faced questions from both teachers and some parents about what was going on.

One expert says none of the options available to Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides were good.

Tim Coates is a retired director of diploma examinations for the government of Alberta, and an instructor in the faculty of education at the University of Alberta.

He said the point of diploma exams was to have students evaluated using a common benchmark.

Exempting students from the January exams means the grades of some students will include exam results, but the grades of others will be entirely based on schoolwork.

"They're not equitable," Coates said. "They can't be equitable because you now have had some people do it, to having written a standardized test, and some haven't."