Jan. 14, 2015
Dear Parents/Guardians,
Student success is the top priority of the Calgary Board of Education. We understand how important diploma exams are to students and their future pursuits. Yesterday the province’s QuestA+ online diploma exam system experienced an outage that affected approximately 4,600 CBE students writing the English Language Arts diploma exam. We recognize these technology issues May have adversely affected a number of students.
We have been advised by Alberta Education that they will allow students who were impacted by the outage to apply for a partial exemption by speaking to their school principals. The partial exemption will calculate their final course mark based on their school awarded mark and the Part B, or reading, part of the diploma exam. Rewrite fees for affected students who wish to rewrite the exam in April or June will also be waived.
As we communicated yesterday, students who wrote today’s Social Studies 30 exam used secure local school computers and were supported by CBE resources. We are pleased to inform you that we did not encounter any technology issues during the writing of this exam, and students who write the French Language Arts 30 diploma exam tomorrow will use the same process. There are 10 more diploma exams scheduled to be written over the next two weeks. The majority of these remaining exams are not technology-based and should not be affected by any potential technology issues.
This has been a difficult time and we will continue to work with Alberta Education. Please know we are committed to doing everything we can to support students.
