Can high school grades be trusted?
If you need better marks, some private schools are happy to oblige—for a fee
Around the same time, a guidance counsellor at Toronto’s Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute went public after discovering that about 50 of the school’s Grade 12 students were taking one or two credits at private academies. In his view, students were essentially buying credits. Responding to the public outcry, between September 2004 and June 2006 government inspectors shut down 10 private academies, finding they weren’t meeting instruction standards set out by the Education Act.
In Ontario, all private schools are required to register annually with the government, but only schools that grant credits leading to the Ontario Secondary School Diploma are inspected—generally every two years, but more often if they are having problems, are new or are expanding. If registration is revoked, however, the school may reapply to the ministry to reopen as a credit-granting institution in the following school year. Today, some of the private schools that were closed in 2004-06 have reopened under new names, or under the same name but in a different location. No other private schools have been shut down since that time.
The Ontario government made other changes to try to address the problem. Under the Education Act, a student’s home school is responsible for recording grades on the official transcript. So when a student leaves the home school to take a couple of courses, she typically brings those results back to her home school for inclusion on the transcript. That practice angered guidance counsellors and teachers, because first of all the grades were suspect, and secondly—at least back then—it looked as if they themselves had given the marks.
The Ontario Universities’ Application Centre made some electronic changes that allowed home high schools to include their “mident numbers”—the official identifiers given by the ministry to every school, public and private, in the province—on the record of grades sent to OUAC, which in turn sends the record on to universities. “The change allowed high schools to report a separate mident number for [outside grades] so that it was clear to the application centre and to the universities receiving the marks that this was not one of their courses,” says Wilfrid Laurier registrar Ray Darling, who at the time of the change chaired the Ontario Universities Council on Admissions.
On the surface, the issue disappeared. The OUAC and universities could now identify where a credit has come from. But the system is far from perfect.
In a letter last December to Darling, Timmings explained why the current system is not working. “A few years ago, the OUAC made it possible for guidance counsellors to indicate the mident number associated with each credit. This is a cumbersome task in this day of electronic-grades-transmission, requiring guidance counsellors to keep track of which credits are earned at other institutions and change the mident number for each such credit manually. Cumbersome or not, however, some guidance counsellors have been following this process regularly with the hope that someone is keeping track of this data and perhaps noticing that the high grades earned from some of these private institutions do not predict the same level of success in university studies that do the grades from regular day schools. Knowing that such research is actually occurring would . . . encourage guidance counsellors in our area to continue and to increase their efforts to provide the mident data via the OUAC tool.”
All hail the public school system and it’s ultimate righteousness. This honestly should be the least of there concerns when huge discrepancies occur within there own program. I have seen people transfer schools after receiving poor grades in 9th and 10th grade to later on graduate with great grade 12 averages and receive national scholarships… The problem doesn’t lie in private schools but the system itself. The system is flawed and there will always be people willing to exploit these flaws for there own personal gains. The simple solution would be to hold students and institutions accountable for these actions. This would be easily achieved by the instalement of a nation wide standarized test like the “sat”.
Credit shopping was common even when I was in high school almost 15 years ago. We picked the easiest teacher from the easiest school on the most difficult subject. The only way to stop credit shopping is introduce public exam, so that every student is ranked on the same scale.
Sign me up, sounds great to me. As someone who goes to the best public academic school in my city, it angers me to no extent how much easier all the other students have it. I could have gone to another high school and seen a 5 mark increase in my average most likely due to a lower standard, and when I’m looking at scholarships for university next year I find myself wishing I did. What are the best (read: worst) online private schools in Ontario so I can get in while it’s still around?
Taking up language courses in their own community schools and receiving 98& averages is not fair when compared to students who do a honest job at school.
Universities wake up!
Standadized testing to get into universities is ‘THE BEST’ ‘THE HONEST’ and “THE CORRECT & FAIR ” thing to do
Tarring all private schools with the same brush is arbitrary and patently unfair.
I have no doubt that there are improper practices by some private schools. However, the ministry of Education holds the responsibility and has the authority to address this problem by identifying them and revoking their licenses. It is four years since the ministry closed four private schools. Since then, the number of private schools has grown like mushrooms, yet the ministry has not closed any other school during this period.
It is not fair to download the consequences of such practices onto the whole population of private schools.
I suggest that Ministry of Education considers the followings to combat this issue:
• sending their inspectors out more often (currently every two years)
• Sending out their inspectors randomly, without pre announcement (currently they give about three months advance notice)
• Regulating the teaching practices
• Checking teacher qualifications and their relevant experiences
Here is the link to the original Ministry Letter and FutureSkills High School response: http://www.futureskills.com/article/
Hassran — No one is tarring all schools with the same brush. Re-read the following paragraph: “Of course, most private schools are reputable. Yet some operations—often referred to as “credit mills” or “credit shops”—are using students desperate to get into university (along with their parents) as cash cows. As long as a student slaps down hundreds of dollars per credit—in some cases as much as $1,500—these schools are happy to oblige with marks in the 80s and 90s, whether the student earns them or not.”
In Germany a new wave of student protests is going on right now: In more than 20 universities lecture halls are and will at least be occupied until Friday. They have the full support of lecturers,profs and the public.
Germany spends less money on education than most other OECD countries (only Spain, Slowakia, Turkey and Ireland invest less in their schools and universities). Other reasons for the protests are the new Bachelor/Master system, tuition fees, psychological pressure, …..
link to a map with all the universities participating in the protests:
http://maps.google.at/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=de&msa=0&msid=116283369278129786033.0004778dfa81fb402d565&ll=49.21042,8.876953&spn=23.014452,46.582031&z=4&source=embed
My brother is looking for a private school to transfer, the first consideration was Century High school though a friend recommend until i read about the article. my brother wants to go to UBC after graduation, my question is if century high school student’s grade is eligible to be accept by UBC. or any other suggested high school to go to? My brother’s english is not good, that’s why he looking for a private school to transfer, otherwise he will be force into a adult high school since public high school does not allow students stay after grade 12 even though students did not pass the english exam.
[...] you have not yet read the Macleans article detailing pay-for-credit high schools in BC, please take some time to do so. This was referenced a [...]
Another aspect regrading attitudes towards credits mills, is that we have told students for many years that they are the greatest (the “child centreded approach in elelmentary), so consequently they believe that they are entitled to everything – usually with as little effort as possible. It is no surprise then that students go out and use credit mills. The arrogance of many of this younger generation is incredible. It appears as they do not have to work for anything. Perhaps that is an article for another day.
[...] you have not yet read the Macleans article detailing pay-for-credit high schools in BC, please take some time to do so. This was referenced a [...]
This is amazing but I’m not surprised. I went to one of the harder public highschools in my city. Other public schools were so easy. If I got a 70 or 80 in a class people at other schools would get marks in the 80′s or 90′s. So annoying.
I wish I’d known about this back in the day. But I got into Waterloo and graduated so I’m happy.
An overhaul of the public school system is overdue. It’s reaching the point where a Canadian version of the SAT’s or standardized entrance test will be required to enter university.
At the same time if a student knows they can get a higher grade I say go for it. (Keep in mind some people will flunk their first year at university because they credit shopped and can’t keep up. Seen it happen time and time again.)
Good luck kiddies.
This is pretty shocking to me, and I think the government should crack down and it should be clear where students take their courses. At least at UBC you have to write the LPI if your English mark is a B or lower – which provides some standardisation (and do provincial exams!).
It’s normal to have some variation (we had easier teachers too – but the variation was 10% or less, not 40%). But this is fraud.