Standardized tests evaluate teachers as well as students

That’s why the teachers’ union objects to them, says Kenneth C. Porteous.

For many years, I was an associate dean in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta and responsible for admitting students from high school. The perspectives I express are based on this experience. My comments should not be interpreted as reflecting the current admission practices to the faculty or the U of A.

If diploma exams disappeared, a position often recommended by the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), there could be no discussion about the difference between a student’s Grade 12 school-based mark and the diploma exam mark.

This experiment has already been done in Alberta. Until the early 1970s, a student’s final Grade 12 mark in a subject was the diploma exam mark. For about a 10-year period ending in the early 1980s, diploma exams were discontinued and all Grade 12 marks were schoolbased. Students graduating in this period were less well-prepared than when diploma exams were offered and the marks often showed a school bias.

Alberta Education recognized the problem and, in 1983, reintroduced diploma exams with the final or blended grade based 50-50 between school and diploma marks. This system seemed to work reasonably well in partially correcting any bias from the school-based mark. In 2016, Alberta Education reduced the weighting of the diploma exam mark from 50 to 30 per cent. Although the ATA pushed for such a change, it remains to be seen whether this was the correct thing to do.

Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia no longer offer diploma or departmental exams. A number of schools in these provinces recognize high school marks from Alberta — which factor in diploma exam results — are a more rigorous indicator of performance than grades earned in their provincial system. As a result, when Alberta students apply, the school adds a premium of a few percentage points to the student’s high school average in the admissions process.

Students who gain admission to a post-secondary program on inflated school grades are being done a disservice. For many decades, the success rate for students in a first-year engineering program in Canada was about 65 to 70 per cent. This was discouraging for students and a waste of resources.

Until the mid 1990s, these kinds of failure rates were experienced regularly at the U of A. At that time, the minimum high school average for admission over five required high school subjects was 70 per cent. Historical data showed students with less than an 80-per-cent high school average were at much higher risk of failing than students with averages above 80 per cent.

Over a couple of years, the minimum high school average was raised to 80 per cent and the failure rate dropped from 30-plus per cent to about 15 per cent. Today, the minimum high school admission average is well above 80 per cent, driven by student demand for a limited number of spaces.

ATA president Steve Ramsankar suggests the widening gap between school-based marks and diploma marks could be explained by various factors. The “bad-day” argument will apply to a very small subset of students but quoted results are based on thousands of students so this cannot explain the difference in averages.

Arguments about “improved instructional strategies,” and thereby improving student outcomes, are not borne out, at least in mathematics, by declining scores of Alberta students on Provincial Achievement Tests at the Grade 6 and 9 levels and Program for International Student Achievement tests.

The premise that all teachers are excellent and that all do and can teach the full curriculum is naive. These are probably bigger factors in the widening gap between school-based and diploma marks.

There are excellent teachers, above-average teachers, average teachers, below-average teachers and poor teachers, all of whom are represented by the ATA.

Ramsankar is a vocal opponent of standardized testing in any form at elementary and high school levels. His objection rests in the belief all ATA members are equal and above average in some sense. This is impossible.

Standardized test results provide data sets which can be parsed down to individual schools and even individual teachers, and thereby provide school and teacher performance measures. This is the real basis for the union’s objection.