There has been much wailing these last couple of weeks about a “sensational” revelation made by Global News (and then again a couple of days later by CBC, as if Global didn’t exist, because that’s how media works) that the University of Waterloo admissions department has a special, secret list of high schools, indicating which ones seem to grade easier than others and also how to adjust grades from these schools so that they can judge applicants on a more or less common scale (the Ottawa Citizen published the actual list, here)

Cue much wailing about grade inflation, parents’ “right to know” about school grading policies and who knows what else.

Everyone needs to calm down.  This is completely normal.  Most universities in the country (AFAIK) have a list that looks a lot like this.  And there’s a pretty simple reason for that: Alberta apart, Canada doesn’t use high-stakes standardized matriculation exams.  That’s mostly to the good but one drawback is that the system doesn’t produce a single universal figure that allows comparison across all graduates (ok, that’s not actually a drawback because the single universal figure produced by standardized exams is biased in all kinds of ways but stick with me).  Instead, Canadians rely on high schools to grade portfolios of work across the last couple of years of secondary and expect universities to interpret those portfolios in ways that result in a fair admissions system.

Now, provincial ministries of education do, to some extent, try to get high schools to grade along similar curves, but there are limits to how strictly this can be done.  There is always going to be some kind of variation, and that variation is always most likely to be visible at the school level because teachers tend to adjust their grades in relation to what those around them are doing.  Thus, you get some high schools where As are easy to obtain and others where they are relatively hard.

This is not – contrary to the way the story has been told in the media – a story of “grade inflation”.  Grade inflation means a rise in averages over time.  This story is about inter-school variation in grading practices.  It’s also a story about how universities, over time, learn to adjust for this variation.  To take the Waterloo example, they can look at how students from different high schools with the same marks tend to fare in some of the big standard first-year courses.  Because most Canadian universities draw maybe 70-80% of their students from under 50 high schools, it’s not hard for them to get sample sizes large enough to look at which schools’ graduates tend to do better, holding secondary grades constant, and thus to develop the kind of list Waterloo did.

So, to sum up: We eschew standardized tests at the cost of local variation in marking, but universities find ways to control for the variation so that being at a school that hands out easy marks does not in fact confer any benefit.  Result: a (more or less) fair entrance system.  Which is what we want, right?

To the extent there is an issue here, it is that kids at schools with easier marking policies are probably being lulled into complacency both about their chances of getting into better schools and about how well they will do once they get there.  It would be worthwhile for the province to periodically collect institutions’ adjustment factors and provide them to secondary schools so that they can adjust their grading policies periodically.

But other than that, this is no big deal.  It’s the system working the way it should.