Alberta school boards want province to review diploma exam program

Alberta school trustees say it's time for the government to review whether the province's diploma exam program is serving students well.

"It's important to have assessments in place so that we understand how our students are succeeding and what is the overall performance of our division," Alberta School Boards Association (ASBA) president Marilyn Dennis said in an interview in November. "But is this high-stakes exam the way to have that all happen?"

In November, school trustees from across the province voted in favour of advocating that the education ministry review the diploma exam program to determine whether the exams are fair indicators of student and education system performance.

Introduced in 1984, diploma exams are a required component of 12 different Grade 12 classes.

Anyone graduating with a high school diploma in Alberta must write, at a minimum, two diploma exams – in social studies and English language arts. The original intent was to ensure students were meeting common standards no matter where in the province they went to school.

The tests have evolved over the decades. About 20 years ago, the government began equating the exams, to ensure their difficulty was consistent from one year to the next.

Until 2015, the exams were worth 50 per cent of a student's final grade in a course, when pressure from ASBA and Alberta teachers nudged the Progressive Conservative government of the day to lower the value to 30 per cent.

A student's teacher-awarded mark and diploma exam marks are reported separately on high school transcripts, so post-secondary institutions can see how students performed when making admissions decisions.

An Alberta Education spokesperson says the last time the exams were reviewed was as part of a 2009 study on assessment. Spokesperson Jessica Lucenko said in an email the review prompted the province to make the exams more inclusive for students with diverse learning needs, such as doubling the amount of time allotted, when needed.

Although diplomas are part of the department's $10 million standardized testing budget, Lucenko didn't have a dollar figure for administering and marking just these exams.

ASBA president Dennis says the COVID-19 pandemic's disruption of diploma exam testing and weighting raises questions about whether they're necessary.

Dennis says graduation rates improved during the pandemic when diploma exam sittings were cancelled, made optional, or were worth a lower proportion of a student's final grade.

The highly controlled standardized tests must be administered at identical dates and times across the province to prevent cheating. A 95-page manual lays out strict rules for how school leaders and staff must handle the materials and run the tests.

Dennis says any review should also consider how the current format is expensive and time-consuming.