Manitoba abruptly cancelled standardized exam last spring, citing issues with material within the test.
The provincial English exam has returned to Manitoba high schools after being abruptly cancelled last year — and one Grade 12 student says the experience wasn't as bad as she had feared.
"People were hyping it up, like, 'Oh, it's the hardest day. And, like, your hands are gonna cramp.' But … it's not as bad as what I expected," St. John's High School student Catherine Rosales told CBC.
She's among the few Manitoba high school students to take the standardized English language arts exam since before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. High school seniors across the province began writing the four-day test earlier this week.
Manitoba cancelled all standardized provincial Grade 12 exams in 2020, over concerns that the mix of in-class and remote learning implemented during the pandemic might prevent students from having equal access to instruction. Schools administered their own exams instead.
The province said it would reinstate the provincial math and English exams for the 2023-24 school year.
The provincial tests for the first semester were written in January of last year, but the English exams were abruptly put on hold again in May due to issues with material within the test, a provincial spokesperson said at the time.
Now that the English exam is back, St. John's student Phoebe Agaya says she felt nervous heading into it.
"It was different from what I expected, because last year I actually took the math provincial exam," she said.
"But for English, what we had to go into is based on what we've learned for the past 12 years of our life. So we couldn't really study it.… You had to just go based on our literary skills," she said.
St. John's English teacher Dan Waldron says many students at the north Winnipeg school felt apprehensive heading into the Grade 12 exam, especially since many have little experience with the standardized tests due to the pandemic hiatus.
"A lot of students hadn't written exams like this before. Before, they were prepared in Grade 8," when students also write provincial exams, he said.
"These ones didn't really get that opportunity."
Waldron helped prepare the students by going over past exams, which he says used a similar format to the one being administered this year.
"A lot of it's just understanding how to answer the question correctly, identifying what's being asked, and then finding samples within the writing and their own lives to talk about how they came to the answer."