libs embrace mediocrity.
A high school student gets 24% in a course. Game over, right? Time to take that class again.
But under the “credit recovery” program, introduced by Ontario’s government in 2005, and focused mainly on Grades 9 and 10, flunking students can simply re-do the part of the course they failed, instead of repeating the whole thing.
The idea is students may lose the motivation to keep ploughing on through their high school credits if they fail too many of them, and drop out.
Ontario’s Auditor General, though, says in his recent report there are “wide variations” in how credit recovery has been delivered and vagueness in education ministry guidelines about how it should work.
There’s no limit to how many credits a student can “recover” and no minimum percentage a student has to get in the original failed course to be eligible for the partial re-do.
Major differences were found in how much weight different schools gave to the credit recovery work in calculating a student’s final mark.
That kid with the 24% course mark? The AG’s report says the student failed 26 of the original 31 course expectations. Not just failed, but got zero in 19 of them.
Yet the student still passed the course by making up just five of those 26 failed expectations.
No one is served by this, the student included. The report says some 17,000 students earned credits through credit recovery in the 2008/09 school year, just over 2.4% of all high school students.
mo
How to pass with a 24% | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun
A high school student gets 24% in a course. Game over, right? Time to take that class again.
But under the “credit recovery” program, introduced by Ontario’s government in 2005, and focused mainly on Grades 9 and 10, flunking students can simply re-do the part of the course they failed, instead of repeating the whole thing.
The idea is students may lose the motivation to keep ploughing on through their high school credits if they fail too many of them, and drop out.
Ontario’s Auditor General, though, says in his recent report there are “wide variations” in how credit recovery has been delivered and vagueness in education ministry guidelines about how it should work.
There’s no limit to how many credits a student can “recover” and no minimum percentage a student has to get in the original failed course to be eligible for the partial re-do.
Major differences were found in how much weight different schools gave to the credit recovery work in calculating a student’s final mark.
That kid with the 24% course mark? The AG’s report says the student failed 26 of the original 31 course expectations. Not just failed, but got zero in 19 of them.
Yet the student still passed the course by making up just five of those 26 failed expectations.
No one is served by this, the student included. The report says some 17,000 students earned credits through credit recovery in the 2008/09 school year, just over 2.4% of all high school students.
mo
How to pass with a 24% | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Sun
