A provincial shift in assessment reporting will mean most School District 64 (SD64) students next year will no longer see letter grades or percentages on their report cards — and a four-point scale will instead be part of a push to help students build a better relationship with their own learning.
The shift to the Provincial Proficiency Scale will affect SD64 students up to Grade 9, according to district officials, and is being guided by British Columbia’s Ministry of Education and Child Care to help align assessment with the curriculum changes from the last several years.
Grades 10-12 will still receive letter grades, at least for now, as the Ministry of Education and Child Care said it will work with post-secondary institutions in the coming years to explore the use of the scale, and to ensure students are able to successfully transition to post-secondary learning.
Gulf Islands Secondary School principal Ryan Massey said that while letter grades are easy enough to understand for parents, the proficiency scale — designating Emerging, Developing, Proficient and Extending levels in each subject area — provides a lot more information for the students about the progress of their own learning.
During a parent meeting Tuesday, May 2, Massey said he’d been using the language in his classrooms for the last two years, and the feedback is that it urges students to become more engaged in their learning outcomes — rather than just what steps they needed to take to improve a letter grade.
“It becomes much more about the learning,” said Massey, “instead of ‘what extra assignment can I do?’”
Additional province-wide changes for the 2023/24 school year that will affect SD64 students include regular graduation status updates for students in Grades 10-12; changing the “I” reporting symbol to “IE” to indicate “insufficient evidence” of learning rather than incomplete work; uniform regular communications of student learning that include students with disabilities or diverse abilities; and student self-assessment and goal-setting for all grades as part of reporting.
SD64 Board of Education chair Tisha Boulter said the self-assessment piece was particularly inspiring, and felt like part of a larger cultural change, with students more connected and engaged with their education rather than passively receiving a curriculum — with practical lessons on goal-setting they can carry with them, she said.
“As they get out into the world, and motivate themselves to find jobs and do what they love, they’ll know more about creating their own goals for themselves, and look at how they met them,” said Boulter. “I think these are lifelong skills.”
For information about the provincial K-12 student reporting policies, visit B.C.’s page on Student Reporting for Families.