Assessment Policy

The Exam Is Back. What Goes On It?

Ontario has made a written final exam mandatory in every Grade 9 to 12 English course outside a few exempt streams. For a lot of departments that's the first English exam in years, and January isn't far away. The interesting question isn't whether you agree with the policy. It's what belongs on the paper.

What Actually Changed

From this school year a secondary mark in Ontario is built from three fixed parts. At Grades 9 and 10 it's 65 percent classroom work, 20 percent final evaluation, and 15 percent attendance and participation. At Grades 11 and 12 it's 65, 25 and 10. That replaces the evaluation chapter departments have worked from since 2010.

For English the whole of that final evaluation is a written exam, written in person during a designated exam period. English is grouped with mathematics and science, and those three are the only subjects with no culminating task component at all. Everywhere else the final evaluation splits between an exam and a culminating task. In English it doesn't split. The Grade 11 English courses in First Nations, Métis and Inuit voices carry the full written exam too, rather than the split that applies to the rest of that subject area.

Locally developed courses at Grades 9 and 10, and workplace preparation and open courses at Grades 11 and 12, are exempt from the written exam requirement. They still need a final evaluation of the same weight. It just doesn't have to be an exam.

The Reflex, and What's Right About It

The first reaction in most English offices was that this is a step backwards, and that a subject built on process and revision is being assessed by the one instrument that allows neither. That reaction isn't silly. A three-week writing process with drafting, conferencing and revision is a better picture of a writer than ninety minutes in a gymnasium will ever be, and anyone who has marked a stack of exam essays knows what the bottom of that stack looks like.

Here's the part worth sitting with, though. The reason the policy exists is the same reason you've been rebuilding your assignments for the last two years. A take-home product stopped being proof of anything the moment a chatbot could produce one. The ministry has reached the same conclusion you did and picked a blunter instrument than you would have picked.

Which means the exam is not the thing to argue with. It's a fifth to a quarter of the mark that a machine cannot touch, handed to you by policy. What it's worth depends entirely on what you put on it.

The Real Risk Is a Thin Exam

The danger isn't the exam. It's the exam that gets written in a hurry in December, made of plot recall, terminology matching and one essay question on a topic students could have prepared a memorised answer for. That paper is worse than the take-home essay it replaced, because it assesses less and defends nothing. It also teaches the department a lesson it shouldn't learn: that exams in English are a formality.

An English exam is not a memory test. It's the one occasion in the course when you can watch every student read something cold and think about it in front of you. That's an unusual amount of evidence, and it's the evidence the whole AI-resistance conversation has been reaching for.

Three Things Worth Putting On the Paper

An unseen passage. Not a text they studied. Something new, chosen to sit near the course thematically, short enough to read twice in the room. Comprehension, inference, and a question about how the writer builds an effect. A student who has read all term can do this. A student who has been handed summaries all term cannot, and the difference shows up in about four lines.

One paragraph written cold, to a structure they know. If your students have been writing SEQEC paragraphs all term, Statement, Example, Quotation, Explanation, Conclusion, then ask for one on the unseen passage. You're not testing whether they can memorise a structure. You're testing whether the structure has become how they think, which is the thing you were actually teaching. Mark it on the same five criteria they've seen all year.

A question that only their own course can answer. Ask them to argue something about a text the class studied, using a moment they chose and annotated themselves. A student who did the reading has four months of specific material to draw on. A generic answer about the novel reads as exactly what it is. This is the question that makes the paper theirs rather than interchangeable with any other school's.

That's a paper you can write from the course you already taught, and it assesses reading, reasoning and writing under conditions you control. It needs no new unit to support it and no new content to be covered.

The 65 Percent Is Still Where the Course Lives

It's easy to read a new exam requirement as the centre of gravity moving. It hasn't. Classroom work is 65 percent of the mark, which is more than the exam and the attendance mark combined. Every checkpoint, every in-class write, every conference and every annotated draft still sits in the larger share, and that's still where students learn to do the thing the exam asks them to do in January. The IGNITE Framework describes assessment for that 65 percent, and nothing in the new policy asks you to collect less of it.

If anything the exam makes the process work easier to defend. A department head who wondered why you were collecting dated planning pages now has an obvious answer: because the students who do that work are the ones who can write for ninety minutes without a chatbot in January.

Where to Start

Not with the exam. Start with one ordinary assignment from the course the exam will cover, and find out what evidence you're currently collecting. The Audit takes eight questions and about five minutes, and it names the weakest part of what you have. If the answer is that everything rests on a take-home product, that's the same finding that makes the exam feel threatening, and it's fixable in an evening.

Then write the exam from the course you actually taught. An unseen passage, a paragraph to a structure they know, and a question only your students can answer. You can draft that in a prep period, starting tomorrow.

Questions Teachers Ask

Where the Numbers Come From

Everything above about the weightings, the exempt courses and the English requirement comes from one primary source, and it's worth reading rather than taking on trust from me or from anyone else.

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  Ontario Ministry of EducationGrowing Success: assessment, evaluation and reporting, Kindergarten to Grade 12. The update headed Mandatory assessment and evaluation requirements for students in Grades 9 to 12, September 2026, which replaces the evaluation policy in chapter 5 and takes effect in the 2026-2027 school year. Published on ontario.ca.

Your board will have its own implementation guidance on exam periods, scheduling and what counts as an excused absence for the attendance portion. That part varies, so check it locally rather than assuming this piece covers it.

Developed by George O'Toole: 35 years in secondary English, Head of Department, Educational Technology Coach, Faculty of Education instructor. Meet George