KAMLOOPS — B.C. High school students will have fewer exams to write thanks to the province’s new curriculum.
Rather than writing five mandatory provincial exams students will write only two.
Superintendent of Schools with School District 73, Karl deBruijn said the move shows a shift in focus away from test performance.
“There will still be examinations,” deBruijn said, “but they’ll be more at the classroom level. Sort of that way allows for more flexibility in terms of how they teach the courses, how the courses are presented.”
deBruijn said the new curriculum is a shift from memorizing facts to developing necessary skills for the future.
“People don’t go to work every day and sit down and write an exam,” he said. “They produce something. They do the work that they do and that’s measured and evaluated all the time and that’s the kind of a switch we’re looking at.”
The exams will cover two key skill areas – numeracy and literacy – and can be taken when high school students are ready, regardless of what grade they are in.
David Komljenovic, President of the Kamloops Thompson Teachers Association, expects the reduced emphasis on exams will help students produce more authentic work in the classroom.
“What we find when there’s exams is it focuses a lot of the curriculum towards the exam and not actually towards learning,” he said. “If there isn’t that pressure with the exams being there and teaching towards the test then there’s more time for students to do more learning, authentic learning, in the classroom.”
Kindergarten to Grade 9 students will learn the new curriculum in September, while it will be introduced in draft form for Grades 10-12.
Komljenovic is concerned that schools are not being provided sufficient resources to properly implement the new curriculum.
“We can’t really move forward unless we have things like technology, we have text books, we have these kinds of things that reflect the new curriculum,” Kamljenovic said.
“That is going to be a consistent concern but we certainly are cautiously optimistic about most of the exams being eliminated.”
