It should be no real surprise that universities have discovered over time a mark from one senior high school is not equal to one from another one. A recent article in the Toronto Star flags Waterloo’s engineering programme, one of many toughest to find yourself in in Canada, as having developed an adjustment factor. The type of whose marks the programme discounts probably the most were two Oakville schools: King’s Christian Collegiate and St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Secondary School. Shockingly, Toronto’s prestigious Upper Canada College also found itself singled out as needing a significant mark discount when evaluating applications.
Back in the 1960s, once the boomers who shaped the current Ontario were in senior high school, about 3% of students became Ontario scholars. Now it’s more than 60%. Oakville Ontario could be smarter, and teaching could be better, but it is not believable that students leaving high school are that much more able. Clearly, good marks are much easier to obtain than they was previously, and in a few schools more than others.
Higher marks cause a lot of problems. It becomes very difficult to distinguish between the best students when there are so many of them. Perhaps even worse, students are resulted in believe they’re more prepared than they actually are and face sometimes substantial and life-changing disappointment when they arrive in post-secondary education.
This recent Maclean’s article gives an insight into what this may mean to students facing the truth of post-secondary standards, a few of whom determine they should not have experienced the institution in the first place. Nevertheless, universities and colleges can simply raise their admission standards, and that is what they have done as mark inflation has run rampant across Ontario.
However, when that inflation is uneven in one school to another, it creates the post-secondary institutions’ job a lot more difficult. According to the Star’s article, Waterloo has developed its adjustment factor in line with the performance of students from a given school in the first year of these engineering programme as time passes. It really needs enough students to make the comparison meaningful and establish a pattern.
Until the 1960s, province-wide exams, referred to as “departmentals,” contributed to the senior high school leaving marks of Ontario students. These were graded anonymously, after being shipped to Toronto, by teachers apart from those who had taught the students.
While Scholastic Aptitude Tests (now simply called SATs) in the United States assessed capability to learn, the departmental exams assessed achievement, which senior high school graduation marks generally represent. These exams were much like Advanced-level (A-level) exams in England, or Baccalaur�at exams in France, which persist (as in most Europe), and in those countries produce 100% of the marks given to universities and colleges for admission. (The International Baccalaureate (IB) works on these principles and is available in Ontario. Many top international universities have greater confidence in such evaluations than in marks assigned by schools with which they have little if any experience.)
These exams are country-wide. All teachers in every schools, including parents homeschooling children, understand that they are going to face these tests. This eliminates grade inflation in earlier years and in mid-year evaluation: grades that do not truly represent the student’s potential will undoubtedly be found out in the end. Virtually every country has them except Canada: even the United States has the SAT to help post-secondary institutions compare students’ capabilities whatever the school they attended.
The arguments against such exams are many. Students face lots of pressure, and their future depends upon their performance in some three hour written exams. Such exams favour visual learners and will close the door for able students whose abilities are different. You can find concerns about “teaching to the test”, limiting teachers’ abilities to explore topics and problem-solving techniques. Proponents point out that at some stage you will have this evaluation to graduate from university or to gain a specialist qualification, and delaying it serves no purpose. Further, they indicate the evils of grade inflation which has obviously run rampant in Ontario since such exams were abandoned.