Christina Park is a graduate student in the Master of Journalism program at the University of British Columbia.Report cards are meant to provide clear and succinct evidence to students and their parents about academic progress. Not so in British Columbia. Instead, crucial information about whether a student is passing or failing has been replaced with a new “Provincial Proficiency Scale” that obscures what’s really happening in the classroom. The proficiency scale, first unveiled in 2023, eliminates As and Fs in favour of four mysterious progress categories. Now, a student is either “Developing,” “Emerging,” “Proficient,” or “Extending.” What these actually mean is anyone’s guess. Most parents and students don’t have a clue. BC’s removal of letter grades is part of a broader, decades-long ideological shift across Canada’s public education system that is abandoning traditional quantitative assessments like standardized grades in favour of “student-centred” qualitative assessments such as descriptive feedback.The proficiency scale has found strong support within the always-trendy education establishment. University of British Columbia education professor Victor Brar argued that the new scale improves the schooling process because it shifts focus away from student failure. “Letter grades highlight the deficits of underperforming students, thereby perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts,” Brar wrote in The Conversation. Instead of sorting students into those who know the material and those who don’t, he likes the fact that the new scale emphasizes how students are learning by including such things as “social-emotional awareness and relations.” Standing logic on its head, he further argued that the old letter grade system was “ambiguous” and hence more subjective than relying on teachers’ opinions about student progress. .But even Brar admitted the change has left families uneasy. Many parents worry that their children will “lose their competitive edge” once they reach universities, which still rely on test results, letter grades, and rankings. To this, Brar argued that students should “consider their competitive relationship with themselves first, before considering it with others.” In other words, the new system is entirely uncompetitive.A year after BC’s policy change, the Fraser Institute conducted a scientific poll of 1,200 Canadian parents and found that 93% said the old system of letter grades was “clear and easy to understand.” Most struggled to define what “Extending” or “Emerging” means. “These changes do not make report cards clearer and easier for parents to understand their child’s academic progress,” the Fraser report concluded. The vagueness of these categories will have real consequences in the classroom. Joanna DeJong VanHof, education program director at the Ottawa-based think tank Cardus, warned that “students who need help the most could be in a situation where they’re falling through the cracks instead of being noticed earlier.” Consider a child labelled as “Emerging” for many years, VanHof said. Under the old system, that student would likely have earned several Ds or Fs, sparking interventions at home and school. Now, parents might never realize that their “Emerging” child is actually failing. Another education expert, John Hilton-O’Brien, executive director of the Alberta-based Parents for Choice in Education, predicted that BC’s new system could make schools less equitable by imposing the greatest costs on the least-advantaged families..“Well-resourced parents can hire tutors, they can interpret these opaque competency-based reports, and they can navigate the system,” he said. But not all families have the resources or the time to figure out whether “Emerging” is better or worse than “Developing.” Hilton-O’Brien warned this could also push parents further away from the center of decision-making for their children, leaving the school as the “sole interpreter of student progress.”The problem of declining educational standards goes far beyond BC’s campaign against letter grades. Other provinces have also been emphasizing qualitative assessments, de-streaming, and “no-zero” marking schemes that prevent teachers from failing students. “There's been this ideological shift from excellence to equalization of outcomes. If unequal outcomes persist, then the system must be unjust. Therefore, we should eliminate the structures that reveal differences,” Hilton-O’Brien observed. But policies like de-streaming and no-fail guarantees have created new classroom challenges, he said, leaving teachers to juggle a wide range of competing needs. It’s like teaching two classes at once, and this has worn down teacher morale..The trend also appears to be having a significant impact on overall Canadian educational standards. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses the reading, math, and science skills of 15-year-olds in countries around the world. Over the past two decades, Canada’s PISA scores have been consistently declining. A more practical approach to education, Hilton-O’Brien noted, should accept that “people naturally differ in pace and disposition and in their aptitudes.” Students who are failing should receive the support they need to succeed, instead of being told that failure doesn’t exist or that all students are equal in abilities and outcomes.As for how to get Canada’s education system back on track, VanHof points to the work of Jonathan Eckert, an education expert at Baylor University in Texas. Eckert promotes the idea of “gritty optimism” in education. “Learning is productive struggle,” he wrote, warning that an excessive focus on student well-being undermines effort, resilience, and the joy of learning.“Gritty optimism really captures the fact that education done well is education in which there’s hard work involved,” VanHof observed. Abolishing letter grades, making all progress relative, eliminating the possibility of failure, and estranging parents from the educational process is the exact opposite of gritty optimism. It’s what you might call a solid F. Christina Park is a graduate student in the Master of Journalism program at the University of British Columbia. The longer, original version of this story first appeared at C2CJournal.ca.
