A grade is a grade

Or is it?

Chelse McKee, staff

Two students, both with an average of 80 per cent, from separate high schools, are accepted into a university, but how can the university be sure that those students’ averages are truly equal in value? Now a project in Ontario has opened up the possibility for universities to know the true value of an applicant’s grade.

Kim Boucher, associate director of undergraduate engineering admissions at the University of Waterloo, with a group of her peers, has been tracking every Ontario high school for the past eight years to see which students come to the school and what their high school average is at the time of application. Boucher said that a good sample size from a school was 15 students, and if a school had a smaller sample size, the research group would then apply Ontario’s average grade to the sample.

In addition, they also tracked the average at the end of the student’s first year of university. Boucher reported that there was decrease from the student’s average when applying to the average at the end of the first year of university, which she described as “not a surprise.” She also noted that recently there has been a larger drop between the two averages.

“There [are] a lot of things it could mean, but we’re not doing an analysis of what it means. It’s just to try and help us to maybe level the playing field a little bit because some schools have tough marking standards, while some schools have more average marking standards,” she said.

Reece Tougas, director of admissions for the University of Manitoba, said that when an applicant’s admittance to the university are being determineding the university focuses solely on the grades.

“It’s strictly grades,” she said. “Grades and just grades. High school performance is the single best indicator of university academic success.”
Tougas mentioned that university admissions do not take into consideration the extracurricular activities of students like American universities do. She claimed that the process of going into other areas of a student’s life would be too time-consuming for both the admissions department and the student.
Tougas explained, “High school grades [are] not within the university’s jurisdiction. That’s a matter for the Manitoba Department of Education.”
Angela Jamieson, a representative from the Government of Manitoba’s communication department, said that the secondary education program in Manitoba is “developed by teams of teachers from across the province.”
She also mentioned that there are academic goals for each curriculum that each student must achieve but that other than that “there are no other measures that specifically control how teachers assess their students or assign marks.”

But, Jamieson says, a recently released support document, entitled “Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind,” will help teachers assess their students.

Lorna Earl and Steven Katz, the authors of the document, state in the report that it is “designed to support teachers in assessing their students effectively, efficiently, and fairly.”

According to Jamieson, “many [Manitoban] school divisions have used this document as they develop assessment policies that address issues of consistency in how students are assessed and marks determined.”