![]() ![]() "I think the teachers' strategy was to try and give students some hope and optimism, and arguably, I think it worked for most students," she said. She says teachers may also have used marks as a way to motivate and encourage students through the challenges of remote learning. Gallagher-Mackay attributes that increase in part to teachers shifting their methods of assessing achievement, giving students greater opportunities to demonstrate what they'd learned, with decreased emphasis on exams. The increase continued in the tumultuous 2020-21 school year, when many Ontario school boards shifted back and forth between in-person and remote learning. WATCH | Why high school grades in Ontario have gone up since 2020:ĭuration 2:04 Ontario high school marks have increased since the pandemic and that's having an impact on students' ability to get into the university programs they want. Much of that rise occurred in the spring of 2020, when Ontario's Ministry of Education issued a directive that each student's mark in each course must not fall below where it stood when the pandemic forced the cancellation of in-person classes. Why grades spiked since COVIDįurther research by the pair - using data from six large school boards that represent one-third of Ontario's student population - found that the proportion of Grade 9 students with 90-plus averages rose from 12 per cent in the 2018-19 school year to 23 per cent in 2020-21. ![]() The data appears in a report by Gallagher-Mackay and York University adjunct professor Robert Brown, published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. "That's huge and pretty unprecedented," said Gallagher-Mackay. The previous six-point rise took 13 years. Toronto District School Board data shows the average Grade 12 student's mark rose from 71 to 77 in a two-year period after the pandemic began. The jump in marks since the pandemic began, however, is so dramatic that it can likely only be explained by additional factors. Gallagher-Mackay attributes the rising grades to a combination of effort within Ontario's school system to improve equity of outcomes, moves to end streaming of students into applied courses, and shifts in immigration that brought more families who prioritized academic achievement. Kelly Gallagher-Mackay is an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who studies educational inequality. ![]()
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