Education Minister Rob Fleming said he’s confident Grade 12 students and their families can now know the grades on their student transcripts are correct.
Students reported seeing incorrect marks when they checked an Education Ministry transcript website on Monday.
On Wednesday, Fleming said the ministry had resolved an issue that forced it to review all final marks for Grade 12 provincial exams written by students in June. The corrected marks were expected to be posted online on Wednesday.
“I know this has caused anxiety for students and their families and I want to assure them that this will not have an impact on admission to colleges and universities,” said Fleming.
“After the discovery, the ministry contacted all post-secondary institutions in Canada and NCAA institutions in the U.S. to ensure that no student applications for the fall would be affected. Post-secondary institutions have stated they will ensure the error in marks reporting won’t negatively impact any incoming students.”
Fleming said when the ministry discovered the problem, he immediately directed staff to work around the clock to fix it. An investigation discovered human error caused the incident when data was being manually transferred between systems.
The ministry pulled all marks offline on Monday and verified exam results by manually reviewing student files. About 32,000 students writing provincial exams on June 22 and 23 were affected.
Ministry staff have now checked the updated results for accuracy, said Fleming. System checks and manual spot checks of results at every stage of the process have confirmed their accuracy.
The grades are being sent directly to post-secondary institutions.
B.C. ombudsperson Jay Chalke issued a statement Wednesday saying he would monitor the Education Ministry’s response to the province-wide Grade 12 tabulation error.
“I am concerned about this error and the impact it may have on students across B.C.,” said Chalke. “This is a very stressful time for students as they make future education plans. I urge the ministry to not only address the technical issue, but to also identify and remedy any individual impacts. Students and parents should be proactively informed about what they can do if they believe they have been adversely affected.”
The ombudsperson has jurisdiction over all B.C. school boards and districts, universities, colleges and the Education and Advanced Education ministries.
Some students checking their grades on the ministry’s online transcript website were thrown into a panic at what one student described as “insanely low” marks.
Students were terrified of losing university acceptances, scholarships and placements on varsity sports teams because of the errors, said Helena Murray-Hill, who recently graduated from Mount Douglas Secondary School.
Murray-Hill said her English teacher sent an email to his students noting their final grades dropped an average of 35.5 percentage points after the provincial exam was included. The exam counts for 40 per cent of the final mark.
In previous years, the average difference between in-class and final marks was about two percentage points, wrote the teacher, adding he had never seen an average difference of more than five points.
Two students in his class who had grades of 94 per cent going into the provincial exam received 22 per cent on the test. One student with a class mark of 98 per cent received three per cent on the final exam.
ldickson@timescolonist.com
