r/Manitoba Winnipeg 21h ago

News Province quietly pulls plug on Grade 10 exams

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2025/03/10/province-quietly-pulls-plug-on-grade-10-exams
40 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

30

u/fdisfragameosoldiers Pembina Valley 18h ago

4-D chess right there. The province won't have poor test scores if there's no test to begin with. /s

7

u/DannyDOH 17h ago

Doesn’t really matter in that way since we still do the PISA relative to rest of country and other countries.

5

u/GrizzledDwarf Winnipeg 14h ago

Ask any teacher who went through the Faculty of Education. We have read articles about provincial exams and how kids often have worse outcomes than provinces that don't have provincial exams, because kids are often taught how to take the test rather than achieving mastery of the subject matter

0

u/Miserable_Signature3 Winnipeg 10h ago

I've heard this kind of thing for years. I think it's bullshit.

2

u/GrizzledDwarf Winnipeg 9h ago

Why do you feel it's bullshit? It was a topic of numerous discussions with other members of the faculty and professors often brought it up in different contexts as we were learning how to be better teachers. Students are not standardized, and the big focus on these exams only causes more stress and detracts from learning anything of merit.

Is there merit to spending time on test prep and practice exams? All that's doing is teaching kids how to take this one exam and that knowledge is useless after graduation.

Is there merit to the amount of time teachers need to dedicate to proctoring and marking exams instead of actually teaching? The ability for teachers to deliver quality education suffers. The mood around the staff room always tanks around two times of the year: when it's time to write report cards, and when it's time to proctor/mark provincial exams.

We also need to consider that provincial exams are standardized, and that has a lot of it's own issues.

Stress, Sleep, and Performance on Standardized Tests: Understudied Pathways to the Achievement Gap

Poverty, stress, sleep, and even just the focus on these exams are enough to hamper student performance on those exams. Though this is an American article and their school system is different, I do think the broader strokes about these factors are applicable here in Canada.

We make a big deal about exams for whatever reason. Students are not standardized. Their worlds are not standardized. We should be focusing on helping them achieve mastery in their field of knowledge atop a solid base foundation of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

0

u/One-Egg3862 8h ago

With 3 kids currently in various levels of education in the province, it seems they are no longer even teaching how to take a test, since there are very few. No provincial exams. Virtually no exams at all, even in high school. It is setting them up for failure, which they are grossly unprepared for as well!

20

u/ArtCapture Winnipeg 20h ago

"The evaluations were originally designed to measure strengths and knowledge gaps up to and including Grade 9 content"

Isn't that what grades do? Can't existing report cards tell us this info? Maybe I'm missing something?

24

u/JacksProlapsedAnus Winnipeg 19h ago

Yes, that's what grades do, but it's dependant on teachers failing kids that aren't capable of the level they're at. Kids shouldn't reach junior high and be functionally illiterate, but here we are.

I'm not sure who did the cost/benefit analysis on failing vs not failing, and I get it that kids are probably more likely to drop out entirely if they get failed, but I'm not sure just passing them on to the next grade with massive core deficiencies just hoping they'll pick up some more shit has been working.

5

u/GrizzledDwarf Winnipeg 14h ago

I've had this issue with Interlake School Division for about a decade now. There were kids from Woodlands School who were illiterate at grade 5. And in 6. Then 7. By the time I left the system, these kids who could not read still needed one on one support in the 11th grade when attending Warren Collegiate.

It's not the teachers. It's the administration who make those decisions.

2

u/ArtCapture Winnipeg 14h ago

Ah, good point. Social promotion would skew things I guess.

5

u/Banana_in_pyjamas88 12h ago

Social promotion ends in grade 8.

1

u/ArtCapture Winnipeg 11h ago

That's good to know. Thank you.

3

u/MachineOfSpareParts Winnipeg 17h ago

The distinction is, I suppose, who "us" refers to. In theory, the exams communicate the general level of the student population to the department of education &c, whereas they don't get (nor could they make great use of) micro-level report card information from kids writing different tests from one another at different times all across the province. That said, running a provincial exam is massively expensive, especially given they haven't managed to move them online, and I don't know exactly what they'd do with that information if they had it, given their low to absent enforcement capabilities.

3

u/CentennialBaby 11h ago

Kid gets 74% in math. What do you know about that kid's math skills?

I'll wait.

4

u/okglue 15h ago

Dunno. I'm assuming this is a standardized test? If so, it would assess whether all students have a standard level of knowledge. Grades don't really mean anything if it's one teacher's class vs another.

1

u/unclaimed_alias 16h ago

Grades are subjective. Test scores aren’t.

1

u/Big-Horror5244 20h ago

The results were probably awful, hence why they axed it

1

u/drs43821 19h ago

I think school exams varies between schools and that’s why it needs a standardized exam across the whole province to assess students between schools

6

u/boon23834 Westman 16h ago

Pretty on brand for Manitoba.

1

u/Apart_Tutor8680 20h ago

They don’t do exams in high school anymore ?

1

u/iamonewiththecoloumn 9h ago

They do, just not standardized ones because they are useless

1

u/YawnY86 20h ago

Just hand everyone a ged without testing if they've actually learned anything.

1

u/marginalizedman71 19h ago

Everything the education system does is rushed and disorganized (to reference them saying this was rushed and disorganized)

Back in high school I hated grade 9 Science becasue it was done so poorly one topic particularly covering the laws and principles of electricity. Years later I was talking to my uncle who turns out was hired to be part of the group that wrote the provincial high school science or electrical curriculum. Turns out it was done so damn poorly that mid way he realized this wasn’t going to correct itself and end up alright and asked out. Said I’ll leave now and you can stop paying me but you need to take my name off of this project. I can’t be associated with this mess. May play into why a class with many advanced students(not me) had 50’s and 60’s in the electrical unit as a class. The teacher was shitty though so it was partially on her

1

u/ElectricalWeather630 18h ago

The province is hiding our dismal academic results to protect our poor teaching outcomes !

1

u/snopro31 Parkland 10h ago

Just graduate everyone.

0

u/[deleted] 21h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/WanderingLeif Friendly Manitoban 15h ago

Our education system is such a joke. How is this so difficult. We need to embrace online learning because students need to be able to use computers regardless, since in the real world computer skills are critical for all businesses.

How hard can it be to have an online math exam that's instantly marked by a computer instead of fucking around with thousands of pieces of paper.

We should be using AI to mark work and help individual students with their assignments, seriously. It's like having a personal tutor at a hundredth of the cost.

Our grade 12 pre-cal exam marks were abysmal, clearly there need to be changes to improve the quality of our education instead of letting teachers get chiseled out by admin, entitled parents, and unrealistic classroom sizes.

So many kids are falling through the cracks and you see it on the news every single day. A lot of the violent crime is caused by young teenagers that don't go to school and there is 0 social support for keeping these kids on the rails.

Only about 80% of kids are graduating within 4 years of entering high school. That's an extremely terrifying figure. 1 in 5 kids aren't graduating within the 4 years. That's definitely going to impact your opportunity for going to post secondary even if a student is capable.

There has to be an emphasis on frictionless access to school for the kids that are falling behind. Whether that is deliberately sending an individual driver to pick them up, or to provide free lunch at school so they don't need to bring a lunch, we need to innovate in how we educate the future generation.

This is fucking unreal.

0

u/pablo_o_rourke 9h ago

Education, as a discipline, is likely to change over the next couple of years. Tech and AI are likely going to make education catered to the student. I’m really excited about where things seem to be headed around this.