Grade Inflation in Edmonton Schools

by Will Zahary Henderson

August 10, 2020


Each year, Alberta Education puts out a curriculum for teachers and students to follow, setting a standard for each course at each grade level. Teachers attempt to follow this curriculum to the best of their abilities so that each of their students can reach the standard. However, when students from different schools take standardized tests such as the Diploma Exams taken in twelfth grade, there are noticeable differences between average scores. In fact, one of the most noticeably variant metrics is the difference between the school-awarded mark and the diploma exam mark; this is called grade inflation.

Ideally, students should receive approximately the same score on a diploma exam than they do in the course itself from projects, unit tests, quizzes, and other measures of success. However, it can be noted that this is seldom the case in Edmonton schools. In fact, the average diploma exam taken in Edmonton* during the 2018-19 school year had 5.82% grade inflation. This number is not insignificant; essentially (unscientifically, but for the sake of simplicity), it means that the average student in Edmonton is achieving a mark nearly 6 percentage points higher in their diploma class than on the diploma exam itself.

The main problem, however, is not the mere fact that grade inflation exists; it is that grade inflation exists unequally. Different schools and classes at each school have vastly different rates of grade inflation.

Let us use the Math 30-1 marks from the 2018-19 school year as an example: at Lillian Osborne High School, the average school-awarded mark was 78.1% and the average diploma exam mark was 75.1%, while at Queen Elizabeth High School, the average school-awarded mark was 75.3% and the average diploma exam mark was 57.4%. Though the average school-awarded marks at these schools were less than 3 percentage points apart from one another, the average diploma exam marks were a whopping 17.7 percentage points apart. At Lillian Osborne, the grade inflation for this class was +3.0 percentage points, while at Queen Elizabeth, it was +17.9 percentage points. This difference is huge; even after weighing the full mark with both components included (school awarded * 0.7 + diploma exam * 0.3), it implies that the average Math 30-1 student at Queen Elizabeth is still at an arbitrary advantage of over 7 percentage points as a result of their inflated school-awarded mark. This demonstrates that even schools that are within the same school board as one another (Edmonton Public School Board, in this case) have very unstandardized marks. This becomes unfair in university applications, scholarship searches, and just about anything else that uses high school marks.

The question that follows, then, is “what can we do about this?”

For one, it is imperative that we keep diploma exams. Diploma exams, and standardized tests in general, receive a lot of hate, and the discussion of possibly removing diploma exams altogether has become a popular one. However, this removes most legitimacy for a student’s mark as it is uncertain whether the student actually even reached the standard. In fact, even with the weighting of only 30% of the overall grade, this exam helps decrease grade inflation to some extent. In the case of the example I used earlier, if the diploma exam were not a factor in students’ marks, Queen Elizabeth students would have been at an arbitrary advantage of 14.9 percentage points, more than double what it is with the diploma exams. Though this is certainly not perfect, it surely is a start. What’s more, the diploma exams act as a standard that the teacher needs to reach with their students to ensure their success. Without the diploma exams, it is possible that a teacher would decide to leave out some information that would be required for the diploma exam.

Schools themselves can use diploma exams as a way to understand how inflated their own classes are, and can use this information to decide how to change their grading difficulty to better reflect the Alberta standard. However, it is clear that this really has not been done, despite years of this data being available not only to the schools, but to the public as well.

A way for universities to combat this, if the schools decide not to, is to do something similar to the University of Waterloo's approach. The University of Waterloo keeps track of how students from each high school end up performing at the university, and they use this data to adjust each applicant’s average when considering it for admission. If universities around the country adopted a system like this, the problem of grade inflation in university admissions would be largely mitigated.


*Not all schools were used in this calculation. Schools in the Public and Catholic school boards were considered, leaving out smaller schools. The full list of schools considered is as follows:
  • Eastglen
  • Edmonton Christian
  • Harry Ainlay
  • J. Percy Page
  • Jasper Place
  • Lillian Osborne
  • M. E. LaZerte
  • McNally
  • Mill Woods Christian
  • Old Scona
  • Queen Elizabeth
  • Ross Sheppard
  • Strathcona
  • Victoria
  • Vimy Ridge
  • W. P. Wagner
  • Archbishop MacDonald
  • Archbishop O'Leary
  • Austin O'Brien
  • Holy Trinity
  • J H Picard
  • Louis St. Laurent
  • Mother Margaret Mary
  • St. Francis Xavier
  • St. Joseph
  • Blessed Oscar Romero