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“I was so worried,” says the now-Grade 12 student at Markham District High School. “We weren’t cultivating skills,” like proper study habits or even building up the stamina��to sit and think critically for hours.

She had her first exam in Grade 11. “To start right then and there, it was a bit of a learning curve.”

But even as exams returned for Ontario’s nearly 650,000 public high school students, concerns over the format’s flaws intensified — chief among them that they rely on memorization and reveal only a snapshot of knowledge.

The pandemic’s disruptive force had accelerated experimentation in assessment — from ”ungrading” to pass-fail options to  — as educators sought out more humane and effective ways to measure achievement.

With teaching and learning having evolved to include more feedback and iteration, educators questioned whether the traditional, high-stakes final exam still had worth.

The answer has been a thorny one for Simcoe County District School Board, which, in attempting to do something different coming out of the pandemic, left its current crop of Grade 12 students without having ever done a formal, multi-hour, end-of-term exam. The changes sparked a petition, a protest and heated board meeting exchanges, and while the board recently responded with a compromise, the resistance illustrates how invested people are when you tinker with tradition.

Detractors of traditional exams claim they are “too anxiety-provoking for students, they’re not an authentic measure of what they know,” says Louis Volante, distinguished professor of educational studies at Brock University.

“All of those arguments have some validity to them, but they fail to recognize one important truism in all of this: which is at the end of the day, when those students go from Grade 12 to university, they’re going to face exams, so how are we doing those students any favours by eliminating them?”

Last semester, when Zawahir had finals in advanced functions, chemistry and biology, she was “super stressed,” feeling like every mark counted. Now, with an offer in hand to study life sciences at the University of Toronto, she’s heading into her final assessments feeling relieved — and thankful for having gone through the experience.

“I’m looking into a career in health care, and there are going to be times when I’m going to have to study for big exams.”

Alternatives to final exams

There is no rule that Ontario students must take exams. The  give teachers latitude to employ any kind of final assessment as long as it makes up 30 per cent of a final grade and allows students to demonstrate their comprehensive knowledge of a course.

For visual art, that might mean a portfolio of work; for music, a solo performance; for science, a lab. Teachers can break down the 30 per cent into multiple, less weighty parts.

“There is no expectation that a course must have an exam,” says a spokesperson from York Region District School Board. “How a student’s learning will be demonstrated is determined collaboratively by the course and department teachers.”

The pc28����District School Board told the Star that while exams remain an element of assessment, they are “not meant to be the sole and/or predominant method of evaluation experienced by students.” Educators are free to display “creativity and innovation,” and “using the tenets of culturally responsive pedagogy and decolonization ... identify alternatives to traditional exams when developing assessment opportunities.”

A handful of Ontario’s 72 district school boards have even dropped the word “exam” from their official calendars, opting to describe evaluations as “summative” or “culminating.” However, only one��— Simcoe County��— is not holding designated finals over the next two weeks.

“I’m a big advocate for authentic assessment; I think there is tremendous value in doing it,” says Volante. “But at the end of the day, an academic student should write an exam for two hours that is worth 30 per cent of their final grade.”

A common refrain he hears from first-year university students is that they didn’t feel prepared. There’s often a disconnect, he says, between the type of assessments in high school and in post-secondary.

University exams, due to class sizes and cost efficiencies, often consist of 500 students in a lecture hall doing a multiple-choice evaluation worth 50 per cent of their grade.

Volante says the practice should be reimagined, but post-secondary isn’t changing anytime soon.

“It’s very heavily skewed towards traditional assessment in the first couple of years in university; that’s when (students) are going to drop out.”

The benefit of honing exam skills early, proponents argue, is not just for the university- or college-bound but also students going into the trades or headed straight into the workforce.

Inevitably, at some point in life, almost everyone gets tested.

Simcoe’s controversial exam experiment��

The Simcoe County school board’s superintendent of student achievement wants to be very clear: “We have always had, and we continue to have, exams,” says Dean Maltby.

But what actually constitutes an exam has been at the centre of an impassioned among students, parents, teachers, staff and trustees at this board north of Toronto.

Post-pandemic, as other boards lifted the pause on exams, that Maltby says many teachers were already practising.

Dubbed “culminating tasks,” assessments could run the gamut — from labs to portfolios, including a sit-down written test if a teacher felt that was the best fit for the course.

But unlike final exams held at the end of term, these culminating tasks were scheduled during regular class more than a month before the end of each semester. were added to the last week of each term to allow all students time to meet with their teachers and advocate for a chance to make up any missed expectations, potentially boosting a grade.

The goal, according to Maltby, was to increase students’ time in front of their teachers and make the whole process more transparent.

“We wanted to make it meaningful,” he says, noting how with traditional finals, students usually don’t even see their results.

Teachers who favoured more traditional exams said the new format was untenable: Scheduled when there was curriculum still to be taught and limited to 75 minutes, any exams, they said, were far from a comprehensive course review and more resembled a unit test.

“Kids knew they had a big chunk of their marks even though there were four weeks left, more than 20 per cent of a course, and so they mentally checked out,” one Simcoe teacher, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly, told the Star.

“The fact that our students know they’re going to university, without having practised writing the exams their peers from other boards have, has made anxiety spike.”

Trustee Sarah Beitz, a vocal opponent of the changes, told a board meeting, “When we don’t have exams on (the schedule) we are saying that we’ve cancelled exam days ... that’s the message that is being sent.”

But sticking to the nomenclature of “exams,” Maltby explained to the Star, would have sent a mixed message to staff that that format was expected, and it wasn’t.

All that helped fuel a narrative that Simcoe had effectively killed the exam.

Opposition rallied last winter. More than 1,300 people signed an open online . �į outside the board’s head office.

Following the outcry, at the end of each semester, followed by Feedback, Recovery, Improvement days. Maltby also confirmed to the Star that there will be more time for each culminating activity.

Ontario’s Ministry of Education would not respond to specific questions about Simcoe County’s singular approach or the inequities it potentially causes, other than to say, “we expect school boards to remain focused on student achievement, which includes a final evaluation worth 30 per cent of a student’s grade.”

Fuel for grade inflation?

Grades remain the most critical factor for getting into competitive post-secondary programs. However, two students in two different boards, schools or even classes can theoretically arrive at the same 90 per cent average in the same course with one never having done a heavily weighted, comprehensive final.

Research suggests that “as soon as you eliminate exams, marks go up,” says Paul W. Bennett, director of policy/research group the Schoolhouse Institute, and author of .

“That’s where grade inflation has crept in. The larger the percentage of teacher-determined grades, the higher the marks.”

Grade inflation has led to calls for standardized exams��— to graduate from high school or enter post-secondary��—��.

It’s unfair that some schools have opportunities other schools don’t, says York Region’s Zawahir, who even with a 97 per cent average didn’t get into her top-choice university. “It’s definitely difficult to digest as someone who has worked very hard for my marks.”

In an extreme example earlier this year, some ��— not due to any academic prowess but because of teacher absences. Even as the board said it was a rare occurrence and promised that marks would be adjusted once permanent teachers were assigned, people decried the seeming advantage those students might have over their peers when it comes to post-secondary admission and scholarships.

“There’s this huge variability that needs to be addressed,” says Zawahir.

The University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering has an admission tool that addresses such inconsistencies and helps it sort through high-achieving applicants. “If there are sustained effects on student performance due to changes in instruction, curriculum or assessment techniques,” says a Waterloo spokesperson, “our adjustment factor may eventually compensate for these effects.”

And while Waterloo acknowledged some high school students may benefit from assignment-based assessments, the spokesperson added that “others may face challenges when preparing for university-level exams that often carry significant weight in STEM fields.”

Post-secondary institutions recognize that applicants can demonstrate specific competencies through any manner of labs, essays, tests and exams, says Marisa Modeski, Western University’s registrar and vice-chair of the Ontario University Registrars’ Association.

But “while universities consider various criteria for awards and scholarships, we do not typically consider how secondary school grades are determined as part of that process.”

What exams can reveal about a student

There are only two exams��— albeit in biology and calculus��— standing in between Sophie Yee and her graduation.

The Grade 12 student from Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute, whose average is hovering around 98 per cent, got an offer to study health sciences at Queen’s University even before she had completed her spring midterms.

“I’m definitely more relaxed compared to previous years,” says Yee, who doesn’t even have to sit the exams to maintain the grades she needs to meet the conditions of her university offer.

A friend, she notes, is considering skipping the math final for this very reason.

But that’s not how Yee is made. “I physically feel uncomfortable when I don’t study; it makes me nervous. So, I will study, but maybe not as rigorously.”

Post-secondary offers of admission, which are based on the average of a student’s top six courses (including requirements), often arrive well before the end of the academic year. They are usually conditional on students maintaining academic standing, although the threshold of that standing is significantly lower than what’s required to get into a competitive program in the first place.

“Final secondary school marks do not usually factor into prospective student evaluations,” says Ryan Hargraves, U of T’s executive director of student recruitment and admissions, but, he adds, “preparation for final exams may support students’ readiness for their post-secondary studies.”

So even as Grade 12 students might be currently contemplating “letting their foot off the gas,” they shouldn’t, warns .

While exams “don’t necessarily reveal intelligence,” he says, “they do reveal commitment; they reveal follow-through; they reveal persistence; and they tell us a little bit about a student’s character.

“It shouldn’t be just about meeting the minimum. You’re not necessarily cheating the university — you’re ultimately cheating yourself of an opportunity to learn.”