London-area high school students reflect after first exams and assessments in 3 years

Emerging out of the pandemic, some high school students are experiencing their first exams and assessments in years. But for most, it’s the very first time.

Students across the Thames Valley District and the London District Catholic school boards are wrapping up their first semester of classes this week, some with final evaluations being presented in new formats compared with in previous years.

According to Christine Giannacopoulos, the superintendent of student achievement for the Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB), all teachers are now required to provide students with two final evaluations, with one possibly being in the form of an exam if they are in Grade 11 or 12.

2:09 Some Ontario schools scrap high school final exams amid COVID-19 pandemic

In November of 2020, the school board cancelled all exams due to the shift to online learning. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, all four grades would have had exams, but not for all courses, Giannacopoulos said.

She said that grades 9 and 10 are now considered “skill development years” and that exams “are not the only way” to evaluate what students have learned.

“You can have a demonstration, you can have a lab, you can even have a performance for drama students or dance students to demonstrate their mastery of the overall expectations through whatever their subject is,” Giannacopoulos said.

“If we were to truly assess what students know, then those evaluations need to reflect what the students have done in the course during the 70 per cent term mark, not just that 30 per cent final evaluation,” she added, saying that final exams and independent study projects are each worth 15 per cent of the student’s overall course mark.

But with year-end assessments and the way they’re presented being altered seemingly every year since 2020, students are prompting some mixed reactions to the current model.

Zoey Berchard, a Grade 10 student from St. Thomas, Ont., said that this time around, “things are still stressful and different.”

“In my first year, we didn’t have this,” she said. “Everything feels like it’s changing every year.”

Logan Powell, another Grade 10 student, expressed similar stressors as he reflected on his first semester of final assessments.

“It’s definitely a huge change,” he said. “Coming from Grade 9 where they just had recovery days, now into Grade 10 where we don’t have those days anymore, it’s just hard to keep tabs on everything.”

Alexis, another Grade 10 student who asked that her last name not be published for privacy reasons, said that “coming from the ninth grade where we didn’t have to do any of this, I feel like I definitely was not as prepared as well as I should have been.”

“It’s way better to be prepared than to just wait it out and not be prepared at all, but this is still definitely a big change,” added fellow Grade 10 classmate Taylor Monteith.

Looking ahead to next year, when the group will be heading into Grade 11 and set to write their first round of exams, they said it’s scary to think about.

6:44 WHO says COVID-19 still a global health emergency

“I don’t know what I’m going to be walking into, again,” Powell said. “So already this year, it was definitely very stressful, and there was a lot of movement all over the place. So, walking into exams, I bet it’s just going to be kind of the same thing.”

Going back to Bechard, she added that “a lot of the other people who are currently in Grade 9, 10 and 11 don’t know what they’re doing because they’re either new or they didn’t do it last year or the two years beforehand.”

“It’s just going to be challenging for people who continue to not understand what’s happening,” she said.

But according to Leah Exley, a Grade 11 student from London, Ont., her exams weren’t as overwhelming as she thought they’d be.

“After my first exam, I got pretty used to it and it just felt like a regular test,” she said.

Theo Brock, another Grade 11 student, echoed similar feelings towards his first exams.

“Hearing about the exams for the first time was a little stressful because I didn’t really know what to expect,” he said, having never written an exam before. “But the teachers did give us a week to prepare so it wasn’t too bad.”

Giannacopoulos stressed that “to have students never have written a final exam, and then have them take one at the end of a course makes zero sense if we haven’t practised those skills and prepared them for that form of assessment.”

She said that a student’s “final evaluation should be reflective of what they’ve practised over the course of the semester.”