Alberta government cancels January Grade 12 diploma exams

The province has cancelled January's diploma exams for Grade 12 students along with Grade 9 provincial achievement tests following a teacher strike.

The Alberta government has cancelled diploma exams scheduled for January for the province’s Grade 12 students in the wake of a three-week teachers’ strike.

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Also cancelled are Grade 9 provincial achievement tests.

The moves came Friday afternoon, a day after the government’s website briefly showed that the exams would be cancelled and that students would receive their school-awarded mark as their final grade.

The press secretary for Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides told CTV News Edmonton on Friday that a back-end glitch had prematurely updated the website.

The strike by Alberta’s more than 50,000 teachers ended Wednesday after closing classroom doors for about 20 per cent of the semester. The province had already made diploma exams scheduled for next month optional.

Normally, diploma exams are worth 30 per cent of a Grade 12 student’s overall grade, with 70 per cent of their mark coming from coursework and other tests.

Students can opt to write their January diploma exams in April or June.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Evan Kenny