Recently graduated high school students on the North Shore should be sleeping a little easier now, after the Ministry of Education fixed a problem that caused a number of their marks on provincial exams to appear abnormally low.
Students in both North Vancouver and West Vancouver were impacted by the glitch, as were graduating students all over the province.
About 35 students in North Vancouver contacted the school district directly, said Deneka Michaud, spokeswoman for the North Vancouver School District, after noticing their marks seemed off.
The problem was discovered July 29, according to the province, after schools contacted the ministry asking about anomalies in the results.
The issue affected about 32,000 students provincewide, who took provincial exams in five Grade 12 English and French courses on June 22 and 23.
Ministry staff pulled all marks offline and worked around the clock to verify exam results manually, according to the province. Universities and colleges across North America were also contacted to ensure no applications were affected.
“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 Minister of Education Rob Fleming on Wednesday, announcing the problem has been fixed.
The marks mix-up was caused by human error when data was being manually transferred between systems, according to the ministry, which resulted in “many students showing a lower result than expected.”
The marks have now been corrected.
