Grade 10 Literacy Test Unrelia
After much protest from students, parents and teachers, the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test of Reading and Writing Skills became a mandatory graduation requirement in 2001 for all students who had entered Grade 9 in September 2000. Administered by the EQAO, the OSSLT is designed to set a standard of literacy across all high schools in Ontario. However, in reality, this test is far from reaching its goals and is instead simply an unfair, time-consuming, and expensive method of punishing those students who may have a few difficulties with the English language. The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test should be simply a measure of the performance of students, not a requirement for high school graduation.When nearly 32,000 of 130,000 Ontario students in 2002 who wrote the literacy test failed (Ricci, "The $21 Million Mistake"), the fairness and accountability of the OSSLT has come into question. There is no way a simple pen and
These preparations for the test gradually start from the beginning of October. This Literacy Test is no more than a time-consuming and costly $15 million sorting machine that limits students' freedom in choosing future careers. During the week before the literacy test, packages are sent to each high school, and all English courses are interrupted so that all class time is to be spent on completing the preparation package. Meanwhile, large amounts of money are being wasted on this unfair and inordinately expensive test, which is not even an accurate gauge of a student's literacy. A large amount of class time is spent before during English class before the test simply for preparation. With more than 130,000 students writing the literacy test every year, it costs the government a lot of money. This means it does not and cannot ever predict the wealth of complexity and skills that an individual can bring to society. Also, if students do very well on the literacy test, then the government will raise the bar and make the test harder, because by definition, not all students should reach the bar. The province could instead be spending this money to deal with the many problems plaguing our schools, such as increasingly large class sizes and the shortage of textbooks and other resources. The literacy test also measures in limited ways, only the reading and writing skills of the students, unlike the qualified and experienced English teachers who assess their performance and overall literacy everyday in the classroom. This means that the literacy test is simply an instrument used by the government to control the process of measuring literacy and artificially adjusting the results as they wish. Also, due to lack of funding, schools are forced to cut down on library, music, guidance, remedial programs, educational assistants and support staff. The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test is a paper and pencil test taken over several days, which measures in an arbitrary way, a limited set of reading and writing skills. Another major problem with the literacy test is the amount of time it takes from the school curriculum.
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