Flava:
Underachieving Ontario high school students are beating out more academically deserving teens for university spots and lucrative scholarships with inflated grades purchased from privately run, for-profit schools.
Provincial inspection reports obtained through freedom of information requests and interviews with students, teachers and principals, reveal:Lax oversight of what many Ontario educators call an expanding “credit mill” industry is creating an unlevel playing field that rewards financial means over ability and hard work, a joint Toronto Star/Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found.
- Grades at some private schools arbitrarily increased upon request
- Credits granted with less than half of mandatory class hours completed
- Outdated curriculums, no lesson plans, no course outlines and missing student assessments
- Difficult questions removed from exams
- Teachers without proper qualifications and those who “do not understand” evaluation and assessment
- Students permitted to take courses without the mandatory prerequisites
- Rewriting of tests for $100
- Students left to write tests with little supervision and access to the Internet.
Pretty bad, but at least in the U.S., where a big part of what private schools offer is the reputation they have established with admissions personnel at colleges their students wish to attend, this would quickly self-correct. For instance, I got into several Ivy League colleges (admittedly during the demographic trough in between the baby boom and the baby boom echo) with a B+ average. My high school wasn't particularly selective, but it did have a reputation for having a rigorous curriculum,and my AP scores, which came after the admissions process was completed, bore that out. This is one place where substantive, expensive-to-administer standardized tests like APs and IBs can play a role -- as, of course, can first-year college grades and remediation and dropout rates. It's a bit harder to gather similar feedback on the performance of college graduates, since the choice of next steps for them is much, much broader.
ReplyDeleteI always wondered what happened to those Atlanta teachers who were busted for cheating.
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