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ATA News staff
Alberta Education has announced that the written portion of the Grade 12 mathematics and science (physics, biology and chemistry) diploma exams will be dropped. The announcement was made to school trustees attending meetings with Education Minister Dave Hancock as part of his provincewide tour to enlist school boards in the government’s campaign to cut education costs.
The decision to remove the long-answer component of the diploma exams will save the government approximately $1.7 million and was made without any consultation with teachers. It will change the fabric of Alberta’s standardized testing program by reorienting how mathematics and science exams are created and assessed.
Despite having made these changes to the exam format, Alberta Education intends to maintain the current weighting of the examinations at 50 per cent of a student’s final grade.
The decision further undermines the credibility of the government’s standardized testing program. “This appears to be an effort to reduce costs and is certainly not driven by educational considerations,” says ATA President Carol Henderson. “Eliminating the written-response section further undermines the face validity and legitimacy of these exams.”
Henderson argues that the government must now reassess the weighting of the tests. “We have always said that having these tests count for 50 per cent of the student’s final mark in these courses is not appropriate. Now that the scope of the tests in relation to the curriculum has been further reduced, it makes sense to reduce the tests’ weight.”
Henderson notes that many teachers and members of the public question whether eliminating the written component is fair to students. Some students, she says, feel that their performance on multiple-choice and numeric-response questions does not allow them to demonstrate the full extent of their learning. While there is a high aggregate correlation between student performance on the various sections of the exams, this is not necessarily true for individual students. Fairness matters, given the potential impact of diploma examination results on students’ prospects for admission into postsecondary studies or access to bursaries and scholarships.
Another concern is that the decision will affect teachers’ ability to provide input into the diploma examination process. Given that this change was made without consultation, teachers might wonder how much input they will have into the design and evaluation of the new diploma exams.
“The minister of education has said that he wants to involve all education partners and the public in a process to re-imagine all aspects of Alberta’s education system. This decision and the way it was made does not inspire confidence for the future of that process,” Henderson says.
To learn more about assessment and accountability in Alberta, and to join the discussion on standardized testing, visit
www.reallearningfirst.ca.
See ATA News Editorial Two Cultures
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