B.C. cancels provincial assessments for Grade 10 to 12 students due to COVID

B.C. graduation assessments for students in grades 10 to 12 will not take place this month due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Over the past few months, the administration of grade 10 to 12 provincial assessments has been impacted significantly by workforce capacity issues related to COVID-19,” reads a statement from B.C.’s education ministry.

“Due to these ongoing impacts, the ministry has made the difficult decision to cancel the January administration of all grade 10 and 12 provincial graduation assessments.”

The ministry says it will provide an “assessment exemption to Grade 12 students impacted by this,” specifically those graduating early this school year.

It promises post-secondary admissions will not be impacted by this change.

“We want to assure everyone that all grade 12 students will graduate on time, both for early graduation and June graduation, as long as all other graduation requirements are met,” said the ministry.

Darren Danyluk is the president of the BC Principals and Vice Principals Association and he says his guess for this decision coming down follows concerns around attendance.

“The complexity of … chasing down students if they’re not able to attend, … the interference that may arise if there’s functional closures that take place during the window of time for the grad assessments,” he listed as examples.

Danyluk adds this won’t impact students who will be applying to post-secondaries.

“It’s meant to be an informative piece of data for school districts to use and for the province to use as a measure of literacy rates for graduates.”

However, there are looming questions he hopes will be answered in the new few weeks.

“There are other windows in the spring for grade twelves to write those assessments. Will the current cohort who would have written in January will we be queuing them up to write their assessments at a later point this spring? Or what is the plan going forward?”

Without the exam, Danyluk believes this is a “missed opportunity” to measure students’ performance levels.

The province says students who are not set to graduate early will be able to complete their assessments in April or June.