Proliferation of ‘credit mills’ shows need for regulation


Opinion: Show where marks came from on all high school students’ transcripts


University of British Columbia admissions has just come out with an extraordinary declaration. If there is more than a 20-point difference between the high school English mark given by the teacher and the government exam mark, university admissions will only look at the government exam mark. Why would they be so mistrustful of a student’s school marks?

One reason is that the university doesn’t always know where the marks come from. The student’s transcript may say s/he is enrolled at Kitsilano high school, but may have taken his or her English course at a disreputable online or private school. The universities have no way of knowing whether the student has earned, or shopped, for their grade. As you can imagine, these fly-by-night schools are very popular with the kind of student that will do anything to get a better mark. In our connected world, information on easy courses gets around fast. A student can drop a course and pick up another online in a matter of minutes. Students who obtain these easy marks are like athletes on steroids. They move ahead of the other students and get the university spots that honest students can’t access.

What effect does this have on our universities? As UBC English professor Stephan Guy-Bray recently put it, “Anyone marking first-year English notices that a lot of students just aren’t up to it. They’ve managed to get into university without basic English skills.”

I’ve seen how online schools conduct their exams. They tell the student to close their textbooks and make sure they’re not getting any extra help before taking the test. This is the equivalent of a teacher in a traditional classroom giving an exam and leaving the room for an hour. Not all students would cheat, but many would. It’s a joke, and sadly it’s being told on the education system in this province.

Janet Steffenhagen’s recent articles in The Vancouver Sun about inflated marks at offshore schools demonstrate how bad the problem is getting. Everyone wants a dogwood certificate, but the standard of the certificate is getting weaker and weaker.

Whose responsibility is it to ensure that education is regulated? It’s the responsibility of the Ministry of Education, of course. But since it heralded in its policy of “choice,” the proliferation of “credit mills” has grown. Looking at the government’s own website it’s evident which schools have an unreasonable gap between school and exam marks. Yet these schools continue to operate. You would think that the Ministry would spend a day looking at their own data and shut down those schools that clearly are unable to maintain a reasonable standard. But for some unknown reason they seem reluctant to do this.

There is another easy solution to this problem — all the government has to do is show where the mark came from on the student’s transcript. The universities can then establish which institutions are reliable and which aren’t. Educators have been clamouring for this approach for years yet the government still doesn’t act. Ontario is suffering from the same problem, but it has gone much further in ensuring their transcripts show where the marks come from. “We will require transcripts include the name of private institutions so that colleges or universities will be able to see where grades are earned,” Ontario education minister Leona Dombrowsky recently said in reaction to public outcry.

Our own education minister Don McRae was once a teacher. He must have given out grades at some point and I’m sure he stood by his grades. Teachers in British Columbia want to continue this tradition, but they can’t if students can continually subvert this process by shopping for the best marks. Why not bring some integrity back to a system that is rapidly losing its credibility?

Peter Hill is a Vancouver English teacher.


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