Jan. 20, 2015
Dear Parents/Guardians,
The Calgary Board of Education is working hard to address concerns raised by the outage of Quest A+ during the writing of Part A: Written Response of the English Language Arts 30-1 and 30-2 diploma exams on Tuesday, January 13, 2015.
The issue was with Alberta Education’s Quest A+ online exam system. Alberta Education has taken full responsibility for the outage, which affected not only CBE schools, but schools in other boards across the province.
Recognizing some students may have been adversely affected by the outage, Alberta Education is now offering students the following options:
a) Students can choose to have their ELA diploma exam (Parts A and B) graded by Alberta Education. This grade will count as their diploma exam mark. Students who choose this option are still able to rewrite both parts of the diploma exam, but they can also choose to only rewrite Part A in April (ELA 30-1) or June (ELA 30-1, ELA 30-2) if they wish. Rewrite fees will be waived.
b) Students can apply through their principal for a partial exemption from the written part of the diploma exam (Part A). With this option the final course mark calculation will be:
- 50% school-mark
- 25% Part B: multiple choice
- 25% Partial exemption mark that is calculated based on the school-awarded mark and the mark from the January 20 Part B: Reading part of the examination. That calculation also considers these two marks relative to the marks of all other students in the province.
- Alberta Education has provided updated information about how the partial exemption mark is calculated at http://www.education.alberta.ca/department/newsroom/diploma-exam-outage-and-exemption-info.aspx .
- Students who choose this option also are still able to rewrite both parts of the diploma exam, but they can also choose to only rewrite Part A in April (ELA 30-1) or June (ELA 30-1 and ELA 30-2) if they wish. Rewrite fees will be waived for these students as well. Students cannot wait until they receive their mark to apply for an exemption. The deadline to apply for an exemption is Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015.
Alberta Education often receives questions about diploma marks and the diploma examination program in general. If you would like more information about the exemption process, please contact the Special Cases team at Alberta Education: telephone 780-427-0010 (toll-free by dialing 403-310-0000); fax: 780-422-4889 or e-mail special.cases@gov.ab.ca.
Sincerely,
Principal
