Ontario Universities Are Paying Close Attention to These Halton High Schools
Published September 19, 2018 at 5:05 pm
If you went to high school and university in Ontario, you know that adjusting to university can be difficult.
Especially when it comes to grading schemes.
If you went to high school and university in Ontario, you know that adjusting to university can be difficult.
Especially when it comes to grading schemes.
A plethora of students face a huge drop in their grades as they transition from high school to university.
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While there might be a number of reasons behind this – in my experience, university might require a different method of studying, students might lose interest or care for a particular course or school in general, or the workload is drastically more intense – grade inflation at some Ontario schools may be a contributing factor.
At the University of Waterloo, the post-secondary institution is tracking students from some Ontario high schools.
And a number of Ontario universities may also be following suit.
Recent imformation obtained by Global News reveals that, for several years now, the University of Waterloo has been using a list of Ontario high schools to determine which students’ marks matched the marks of their engineering graduates, as a factor in accepting students.
And which high school students’ marks didn’t make the cut.
On average, the list reveals how much students’ grades drop from their high school to Waterloo’s engineering program.
This basically demonstrates that different high schools have different marking schemes across the province.
So if three different students receive the same grade from three different high schools, those grades could mean different things, taking that grade inflation into account.
This is risky for those students entering university. Global News’s report reads that students with inflated marks risk being placed in programs they’re not prepared for.
“As well, the university risks being unfair to graduates of schools with more rigorous marking standards,” reads the report.
The list contains about 70 Ontario high schools, and it changes every year, according to Global News.
Which Halton schools are on the list?
The list reads that St Thomas Aquinas SS in Oakville inflates marks by 25.4 per cent, King’s Christian Collegiate in Oakville inflates marks by 23.6 per cent, Robert Bateman HS in Burlington inflates marks by 20.7 per cent, Milton District HS inflates marks by 11.8 per cent.
On average, Ontario high schools are inflating marks by 16.3 per cent.
There’s clearly a major discrepancy in grading systems across the board.
You can find the full list and report, courtesy of Global News, here.
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