Grade 12 transcript issue ‘resolved,’ won’t affect school admissions, minister says
VICTORIA — British Columbia’s Education Minister Rob Fleming says an issue affecting transcripts for Grade 12 students who wrote provincial exams in June has now been resolved.
In a statement Wednesday, Fleming says ministry staff worked around the clock to identify and fix the issue after errors were discovered on student transcripts.
The investigation found mistakes were made through human error when data was being manually transferred between systems.
Grade 12 students intending to enter Canadian universities in the fall are often accepted at their chosen institution based on marks that only reflect their first two terms of Grade 12 work.
But students are accepted on the provision their final marks don’t drop significantly, and with the deadline for final transcripts looming, some students feared the potentially incorrect results from provincial exams could jeopardize their plans.
Fleming says system checks and manual spot checks of results have now confirmed their accuracy and the updated grades will be communicated directly to post-secondary institutions.
“I am confident that students and families can now know their grades are correct,” Fleming says in the statement.
“I know this has caused anxiety for students and their families, and I want to assure them that this will not have an impact on admission to colleges and universities.”
After discovering the issue, the ministry contacted all postsecondary institutions in Canada and some institutions in the United States to ensure that no student application for the fall would be affected, Fleming says.
In a message posted Monday via the ministry’s online transcript service, students were advised of the problem and assured that ministry staff were working to identify and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
The transcript page was taken off-line and attempts to access it produced a message saying it is unavailable due to maintenance.
Advisories sent to students and parents of several Metro Vancouver secondary schools confirmed the problem relates to the English 12 exam and the exam written by B.C.’s French immersion students.
B.C. ombudsperson Jay Chalke expressed concern about the false transcripts, saying in a news release that students and parents should be proactively informed about what they could do if they believed they were adversely affected.