Assessment Practice and Student Learning

The purpose of assessment is to gather information about your child’s progress in order to improve your child’s learning. Information related to assessment is communicated in a clear manner to students and parents. Based on meaningful and clear assessment practices, your child will be:

• engaged and empowered in his or her learning.
• provided with supported learning opportunities.
• actively participating in the assessment of his or her work.  

Assessment tasks provide your child with information that he or she can use for self-reflection and self-evaluation.  Based on our research, students progress successfully with their learning when they feel  ownership for their learning.

Summative Assessment refers to those learning activities designed to collect information about your child’s progress at the end of a period of instruction for grading purposes.

• Summative assessment may include performance tasks, quizzes, exams, selected assignments, midterm exams and final exams.
• Summative assessment may happen either on-line or face to face.
• Your child’s achievement of the stated learning outcomes through summative assessments is the primary basis for grading.
• Your child is expected to write all final exams and diplomas as instructed by the teacher.

The following descriptors used in student reports refers to the quality of student performance and demonstration of understanding of the essential learning outcomes as outlined for the course in the Alberta Program of Studies

Reporting provides you and your child with an evaluation of student performance in relation to the goals and objectives of the Alberta Program of Studies.

Teachers evaluate and assess your child’s level of understanding of Alberta curricular outcomes. Cumulative marks will be used in conjunction with teacher professional judgment to reflect your child’s ongoing and final achievement in courses. Teacher professional judgement will be exercised to evaluate and triangulate evidence of student learning based on

• recency
• sufficiency
• consistency
• validity

of student’s level of performance.

Teachers will instruct our students on the appropriate strategies for citing sources, writing footnotes and bibliographies. This instruction forms part of the Getting Online (GO) orientation course. Teachers will refer to the APA or MLA style guide and you will be taught age and grade appropriate proper citation and referencing techniques and given guidelines to follow for quoting and sourcing another person’s work. Should students not follow the referencing guidelines for their grade and subjects, teachers will work with students to understand how to present work that requires referencing techniques. Instruction will identify strategies to avoid plagiarism (copying the work of another individual and inferring that it is the student’s own work) . Students will learn how to reference materials borrowed from the Internet, (for example, copying and pasting text or photographs from internet sites. 

Post secondary institutions take this violation very seriously and student discipline includes expulsion from the university. See this page at the University of Alberta.

Teachers use strategies to identify cheating, plagiarism, copying, or gaining access to answers for a test or assignment in a way that does not reflect the student’s own understanding of the concept. Should this behavior persist parents will be notified and consequences will be assigned by the teacher in conjunction with the school administration. A mark will be awarded when an alternative assignment or test is completed by the student. A record of the incident will be kept and repeat offences will be dealt with by the administration.

Plagiarism or cheating on an exam with result in an invalidation of the exam and an assessment of zero. 

Plagiarism will be reported on the student progress report. 

Alberta Education has very strict policies about cheating and plagiarism as outlined in these documents. (page 8). Students risk having their transcripts annotated with notes about the plagiarism, having their transcripts frozen so that universities are alerted to plagiarism and being denied re-writes for a year. Palliser Beyond Borders takes these offenses just as seriously.