Alberta reduces diploma exam weight, teachers say ‘long term’ approach needed

The Alberta government announced Monday it’s going to reduce the weight of diploma exams to 20 per cent to alleviate the stress students faced during the pandemic, but teachers say a “long term” approach is needed.

The province reduced the weight of provincial exams from 50 to 30 per cent in 2015, and say it was to give “greater value to course work through the year,” and to help teachers “assess a broad range of student knowledge and skills.”

Alberta students’ diploma exams were cancelled in April and June 2020 as students were “learning from home for those months of the year.”

The province brought them back in August that year.

Diploma exams were optional for 2020-21, and the following year saw the cancellation of the January exams. The remaining exams for that year saw the weight reduced further to 10 per cent.

However, despite the reduced weight on diploma exams, the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) says the province isn’t addressing the issues currently plaguing classrooms, such as class sizes and mental health support.

“It’s a welcome measure, but it’s a little bit backward facing,” president of the ATA Jason Schilling said. “We still need the government to look at some of the other pressures that students and teachers are facing in schools right now, such as class sizes, looking at supports that students need for their learning needs, extra teachers in schools, EA support, looking for other literacy support that students would need in class.”

The addition of optional exams from the province in 2020-21 was well received, Schilling said, as that option helped those in school deal with the unpredictable nature of the pandemic.

“Whether you have the weighting of the diploma exam at 30 per cent, 20 per cent, or 10 per cent, students still feel the pressure of that exam, teachers will still feel the pressure of trying to get to those exams at the end of the semester,” Schilling said.

“We saw that earlier in the pandemic, when the government did that (optional exams), due to the course of the fact that school was just so unpredictable at that time, whether they be in class or be working online, so making the test optional actually takes that pressure off of students and teachers in the classroom.”

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Schilling also says, as an English teacher to boot, that the concerns are only on some post-secondary institutions requiring the exams for their entrance requirements.

“But teachers use a variety of methods to evaluate and assess their students through the course of the year,” Schilling said. “I have used all sorts of things to grade my students.”

“A diploma exam is one exam on one day and time that gives you feedback on a very small section of the curriculum, whereas the work that teachers do with their students in their classrooms is much broader in terms of assessment.”

Education minister Adriana LaGrange says the province made this decision based on feedback from 40 public, separate, and francophone authorities, along with “stakeholders” and their listed perspectives.

“Changing the weight of diploma exams will reduce the burden on students while still giving them valuable exam writing experience. We’re making this temporary change to place less of a burden on students and improve their mental health,” LaGrange said in a statement.

Scott Morrison, the president of the College of Alberta School Superintendents (CASS), says it “supports the ministry’s transitional approach,” with the diploma exam weights.

“This decision is reflective of a recommendation an ad hoc committee of CASS made during the pandemic and takes a balanced approach between a return to normal and meeting the social and emotional needs of students,” Morrison said in a statement.

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Schilling, on the other hand, says while the province has invested money in mental health support for schools and has made a “variety of websites” to help students, it needs to take a “long term approach” to help with their mental health.

“Coming from a rural district, we’d get a counsellor in once a week, to work with our students, we need somebody in there on a daily basis to address the needs with that,” Schilling said.

“Students are working in classrooms across this province in some areas, with 40 kids in the classroom. There’s a lot of pressure, and there’s that puts a lot of extra stress on students and teachers. And so we need to address class size as well.”

Alberta’s 20 percent weight reduction will be for the current 2022-23 school year, but the exam weight will return to 30 per cent in the following year.

-With files from Chris Bowen