BC has a scholarship and awards program that rewards students for high academic achievement. However, we’ve heard that the program needs to be changed to reflect a more personalized approach to student learning.
How do we change our scholarship and awards program to better reflect a more personalized learning environment?
As a Graduate of 2012 i was on the tale end of the old system. I was also a LD student. Giving and rewarding students with high grades and makes is grate. However, what about the student s that worker harder than every other student in the class yet cant get the make to get the scholarships or get the “Passport ” program?
As a LD student i knew others as well. Many of our academics suffered. I remember not getting enough sleep. or spending 4hours a day on Engish 12 homework just so i could get a B and than another 3hours a day doing math homework. Other students got A’s and the work no where close to what i was working at. Yet they got All the scholarship money? how is that fair?
Many LD kids i new where Grate with hands on things like music, arts, and trades. I think there should be schooler ship money set aside for the LD and Speshal needs students and not look at there academics but look at there electives. Or teachers of academic classes can recomend that student for a scholarship.
There used to be a very useful website called ‘BC Awards online’ (possibly updated by Ministry of Ed). It compiled BC Awards that secondary students could apply for, included sorting by deadlines or other variables. Not only Ministry scholarships but any and all scholarships were posted there. VERY useful. Does anyone know what happened to that site? Or other ways for secondary and post-secondary students to find scholarships in just BC? Or how to advertise scholarships to all secondary schools in BC?
Hi,
The BC Awards online site is no longer active. You may wish to try the link below or the school district that child is in. I would also recommend talking with your school counsellor.
http://www.aved.gov.bc.ca/studentaidbc/explore/grants-scholarships/
BC Awards On-line was an amazing resource for students! It was managed by SD 61 (Victoria). Due to budget cuts, this was eliminated in 2009. There was a very small outcry from Counsellors and few others who felt that this resource was worth saving, but to no avail. The Counsellors Association did keep it up on the web for a year or two, but, I’m sure with no funding to update it, became obsolete and disappeared entirely. Students at our school used it alot. So much work went into this resource and it was so valuable, still can’t believe ‘someone’ thought this was a good idea.
I think the program could give consideration to the area of study a study wishes to enter. High achievement should not be the only thing that is considered. There should be consideration given to the need the person will fulfill within the community and whether or not they intend on providing a service to their community.
Thanks for your comment, Lynette. The following resource contains information on our current scholarships and awards programs (see Chapter 6).
http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/exams/handbook/1112/handbook_of_procedures.pdf
As you will see, some of these awards do include a community service component to them. For example, one third of the weighting for the Passport Awards is for things like effort, work habits, citizenship and school/community involvement. Many local scholarships and bursaries have community involvement components as well.
It might be more reasonable to extend the calculated academic period from one to two years for adults working part-time on the adult graduation program.
Scholarship and bursaries need to account for the diversity of learners. As a new immigrant in BC with no knowledge of English, I had no chance to get anything! I did not even know about those! Then, in university, I had to take jobs not to go in debt because my parents were struggling. Not only did I have to learn English, but I also spend some time working. Of course, studying was much harder for me. While others were having fun (and presumably those kids who got scholarships), I was translating the English courses I was taking using a dictionary! Are there ANY scholarships/bursaries that recognize JUST the effort that a kid put into studying?
With regard to effort…
I am a carpenter…if I spend a long time and try really really hard to make a set of stairs….and if it doesn’t work in the end, I don’t deserve the reward for making them.
Effort alone is not a measure of success.
Also, the kids that get scholarships and bursaries aren’t necessarily out having fun all the time…many applications for scholarships and bursaries require short essays as part of the application processes. The kids that get them DO put in a lot of effort…and once they get into good post-secondary programs, they typically maintain the same work-ethic that got them the scholarships and bursaries in the first place.
The ‘diversity of learners’ meme is destructive, because it encourages the lowering of standards…it says that if Tommy can’t understand math like the other kids, he deserves to learn math differently…and then when he gets a job as a banker, if he can’t do the work the way the bank wants, his math education immediately loses its value. Diversity in the context of education is often about making things equally easy for people….not about making things equally valuable.
Get rid of online courses first of all because they are a JOKE! Students doing PE online? Are you kidding? Once you take the teacher out of the equation, you have removed anything that is a personal relationship! Online courses do nothing to facilitate critical thinking and the ability to bounce ideas or arguments off fellow students which is where a LOT of the real learning is done.
UBC had online courses for third year cell biology, and they removed them because they didn’t work – only a few people will benefit from this. This is wasteful in terms of money – and doesn’t give that personal aspect that is necessary to help guide students in transitioning into the workforce or trades.
I don’t know where you get the idea that online courses are a joke. Our school offers an ‘online’ PE course, and most of the kids do more exercise than they would in a regular PE classroom. They have to attend fitness tests once a month, and they have to either come to some of our teachers’ group activities or get involved in organized activities within the community. They also have to complete assignments that show that they have thought about the impact of lifelong fitness activities on their quality of life.
All courses, whether online or in the classroom have the potential for kids to take it seriously or not.
How many times have you seen the kids who are not into PE take outfield positions so they just stand there? Or, they go to the bathroom and not come back? Or they do the activity when the teacher is looking, and stop when their attention is the other way.
When kids choose an alternative to the traditional classroom, they are choosing something different. This does not make it ‘less than’.
Your example of UBC is not a legitimate one, because while they may have removed that one course, they offer whole Masters level degrees online. These include a high level of critical thinking and peer interaction. How much critical thinking occurs, and how much interaction with peers students have is dependent upon the way that the teacher structures their class and sets up their course materials, and this is true of both online courses AND face-to-face classrooms. Good teachers are good teachers, and poor teachers are poor teachers regardless of the medium for information delivery.
Did you know that students who take online English 10 courses do better on provincial exams than students in regular classrooms? I haven’t heard any statistics on other subject areas, but I would suspect that it would be similar because the students must complete all of the course before they are ‘done’, while in the classroom the teachers might run out of time and skip sections that they don’t get to.
Many schools will not include distributed learning courses as part of their honour roll, district scholarship and passport criteria. If a student does well in a course(s) taken through DL they do not count – the school only counts courses taken at their school of record. This is very punitive towards students who take advantage of, and are successful at, DL.
I even have students tell me that their home school has told them that courses taken through DL are not given credit and do not count toward graduation!
There is a great feeling of competition for funding that has been established between DL and regular schools.
In our district, online courses are considered in the honour roll system. The local DL school reports the students’ grades and percent of the course completed to our regular schools a week before our report cards go out so that they calculations can be made.
This is why it is important to have local DL rather than centralized, so that we can work together to make our students lives better.
Unfortunately, the feeling of competition is somewhat founded because of the way that students are funded. I think that this is unavoidable, however, I also think that it will be instructive to teachers. I have always noted that the best, and most dynamic teachers seem to be in the elective courses. It was true when I was a teen, and it seems to still be the case with my daughter’s teachers.
The arts and life skills courses, being almost completely student choice, have always had to compete somewhat for students to choose their courses (and parents seem to devalue “non-academic” courses). Meanwhile, everyone has to take English and Math, so these courses just exist, and the teachers don’t have to consider student retention. Good classroom teachers have nothing to fear from DL, because their strong teaching abilities, passion for teaching, and ability to make the curriculum come alive make students want to take their courses.
Currently, the Passport to Education program seems to be leaving full-time DL students out of the mix. How does this happen? I am not 100% sure of the logistics, but it is based on a September head-count, and because in DL our students do not enroll in a course until they are actually active in the course, often they enroll after the September 1701 period.
We still get funded for them, and they usually take more than the 5 courses required to trigger passport funding, but unfortunately they do not trigger this funding because of the timing.
If we have them complete their activation assignments for 5+ courses and register them early, it could solve this issue, however, this would go against active policies, which could cause us to lose funding through the audit process.
If you want to improve the scholarship system, I think that one thing that you should be doing is to be looking at a better way to allocate Passport to Education scholarships to DL schools and students.
Agreed, Louise.
For DL schools, passport eligibility is based on the combined Sept and Feb 1701 counts. Together they must equal 5 courses.
Unfortunately, given the over the top requirements for courses to actually be considered active and thus claimable on 1701, it is rare for second semester students to actually activate their full course load in time for the Feb 1701. Outside of a complete change to current passport allocation methods, it would seem that the only way for DL students to gain equal access to Passport stickers would be to include the May 1701 in the totals or to change the rules for DL activation policies.
The current policy makes plenty of sense in the context of the era in which the rules were written. At that time no one could have anticipated that massive growth in DL nor the minefield of funding policy rules that would accompany it. Things have evolved since then and it would seem the time has come for the passport program to evolve as well.
In fact, the September 30 count takes in students who start courses from May to September. Students who have “activated” 5 or more courses are included in the count. There is another count in February. The problem for DL schools is that those students who start courses between February and May would not be counted in the allocation.
Where is the “Question 1-6 Wrap-up” forum, “Question 7-9 Wrap-up” forum, etc?
Those forums contained many pages of comments from citizens; where are those comments now?
Links to those missing comments no longer work either.
The value of this website is not just the comments, but the connections between the comments as well. That’s why they call it the web.
This website cannot be successful if comments just disappear and links get broken.
Hi Richard,
As you have probably noticed we have re-opened the old questions for comments and have provided summaries to date (snapshots) for most of them. We are in the process of writing the rest of them right now. As such, keeping the 1-6 and 7-9 Snapshots open for more comments would be counterproductive, as you can leave your new comments under the questions once again. The 1-6 and 7-9 Snapshots will be archived as PDF’s in our Additional Readings section if you have a need to refer to them further in the future. These will be posted soon.
By deleting those forums you have deleted all the citizen comments those forums contained. And you have broken any and all links to those original comments. That is obviously not best practice!
Do not delete any original comments!
Do not break links to any original comments!
If you want to re-open questions that were previously closed, simply re-open those questions for commenting. There is no reason to delete any original comments, and every reason not to delete original comments!
If you have a burning desire to summarize the original comments, by all means go to town, but do not delete the original comments or break the links to those original comments!
The original comments are primary sources of information and are valuable above and beyond any summaries that may or may not exist.
And if you decide to move any original comments, make sure that the link to each original comment remains the same or the web of knowledge that was previously contructed using those original comments will be destroyed.
Moderator Heather stated, “keeping the 1-6 and 7-9 Snapshots open for more comments would be counterproductive, as you can leave your new comments under the questions once again”
But that leaves close to 500 comments in the 1-6 and 7-9 forums, to which citizens will not be able to reply.
It was a mistake to close forums to commenting in the first place. Re-opening the forums was the right move, but then closing the 1-6 and 7-9 forum was just another mistake.
For example, on Twitter and on some education blogs there are discussions happening about “Flipped Teaching”. I have tried to promote participants in those conversations to read and reply to related comments here on the BC Ed Plan website by providing links, but the comments I am trying to link to are in the forums that are closed to comments. So anyone who visits those BC Ed Plan comments can read them but not contribute to the discussion. So the discussion goes elsewhere.
Closing those forums is what seems counterproductive to the BC Ed Plan website; don’t we want to encourage citizens to engage in the discussions?
I suggest that you reconsider your decision to close the 1-6 & 7-9 forums.
We will be posting a PDF archive of the 1-6 and 7-9 snapshots shortly. If there are comments in there that you feel strongly about linking to we invite you to either resubmit them under the appropriate question or include them with your new posts. It’s become too unmanageable to leave everything open in its entirety.
Moderator Mike stated, “If there are comments in there that you feel strongly about linking to we invite you to either resubmit them under the appropriate question or include them with your new posts.”
It’s way too late for that. There are about 500 citizen comments in those 2 forums and those comments had links to them on the internet and bookmarks in people’s browsers way before you recently closed those 2 forums to commenting.
Moderator Mike stated, “It’s become too unmanageable to leave everything open in its entirety.”
Would you clarify that, please? It only takes a click of a button to re-open a forum to commenting, and there are only 2 forums that need to be re-opened.
Isn’t citizen input and online discussion the entire purpose of this website? Why would you suggest such a work-around?
Suggesting that citizens copy their own comments from the 2 closed forums to the remaining open forums is an unacceptable work-around. This government spent more than $1.7 million on TV advertising alone to encourage citizens to participate on this website. Your suggestion discourages participation and that is counterproductive.
And it is not possible for citizens to change all the existing links on the internet to new addresses for those comments on the BC Ed Plan website(although it IS possible for BC Ed Plan website admins to move a comment while ensuring that its web address remains intact).
Please, just turn on commenting for the 2 closed forums. Or have an IT Admin move all the comments WITHOUT breaking the links to those comments.
Thanks for restoring the missing forums and the approx 500 comments they contained.
Scholarship, bursary and loan programs should be greatly scaled back or even cancelled. The very worst thing that we should be introducing our children to is the concept of the ‘free ride’. If each and every tuition at the post secondary level was paid with earned money, the countless years wasted by drifting aimless youth would be greatly curtailed. As a bonus our industrial machine would have many of the bright young minds available to contribute to our Province’s progress instead of getting ruined by 4-6 years of debauchery at university.
Scholarships reward hard work, academic achievement and positive attitudes. These are neither the attributes of “the ‘free ride’”, nor of “drifting aimless youth”.
Good grades are a personal acheivement. Since a service has not been provided to anyone other than the student herself, no compensation is warranted. The idea that someone intensely accomplishing acheivement for themselves should be entitled to a free ride in life is extremely wrong headed.
Many folks who promote scholarships, bursaries and students loans likely have good intentions. The result of this policy has been a bloated, overcompensated university system with hundreds of thousands of 23-30 year olds with expensive but useless skills saddled with debt looking to a future of servitude with their best working years already wasted!
The scholarship program needs to reflect the difficulty Northern students have in accessing post-secondary education. The cost of living away from home can at least double their cost of education as compared with students in the lower mainland or southern Vancouver Island.
I agree 100% with comment in C.Welch’s post, re: scholarship (and grad) marks:
“now based in part on Gr.10 & 11 exam marks. Not only are these marks suspect because they are marked by the schools themselves, but many students who will go beyond high school don’t have a firm commitment until Gr. 12.”
I have an example of this in my home; became really dedicated student in second part of Gr./11 and all Gr.12, but quite devastated when this was introduced this year because Gr.10 was not a particularly successful year. This move seems more bureaucratic thinking than school-based or learner-focused thinking…and support.
most of the grade 10 exams are now administered and marked electronically. I assure you they are NOT marked by the schools and the marks are therefore not suspect – at least not in the way you suggest.
The English 10 exam, like the Socials 11 exam, requires a large degree of school-based marking. I should know: I’ve marked them. Indeed, the majority of the English 10 exam is marked by school-based teachers.
Compared the the processes built into the old Gr. 12 exams, these two exams are NOT marked with the same degree of veracity and neutrality.
The only difference was location – provincial grade 12 exams were marked off-site by teachers just like the ones who mark English 10 now. Yes, we were paid for it, but from a statistical or best practices standpoint there is no difference.
Additionally, Science 10 and Math 10 are marked electronically and have nothing to do with teachers at that school or any other.
We are missing the point here – either we agree that teachers are professionals who can mark exams or we don’t. This is like saying doctors can’t make their own determinations on the health of their patients based on lab results or that dentists need a second opinion on the x-rays of their patients teeth. Teachers are trained to prepare, administer, mark and evaluate tests professionally.
It’s not an either/or scenario. It’s a matter of degree. Identities of students in SS11 and En10 exams marked locally are not totally confidential as they are in the Gr. 12 exams marked elsewhere. I’ve seen many times when the names of students were attributed to essays and paragraphs. If we were to ever put serious money into these exams, this would be a major concern, though certainly not my only one.
I have to accept what you’re saying even though I never saw such in either the invigilation of grade 12 and grade 10 exams, nor in marking of them nor did I ever hear about it from others schools. The students are issued unique numeric ids which obviated the need for students to put their names on any document they submitted. Obviously there were different systems used at different schools. I write this then, to assert that the Ministry guidelines when observed properly provided a clean, anonymous system of test management.
Hugh says:
“I have an example of this in my home; became really dedicated student in second part of Gr./11 and all Gr.12, but quite devastated when this was introduced this year because Gr.10 was not a particularly successful year.”
Heather says (in addition to my comment further down):
“How very convenient (and coincidental) Hugh that your child started to work hard in latter half of Grade 11 and during Grade 12.” Too bad the universities and colleges aren’t being so readily fooled by this tactic any longer.
Let’s be clear about BC’s scholarship program: it’s a joke. It offers very little money, and very few students actually receive anything. In fact, there’s been no increase in scholarship amounts for decades. So anyone serious about post-secondary education realizes that the smart thing to do is get a part-time job and save money.
Compounding this lack of provincial scholarship money is the growing trend of awarding local scholarships for “citizenship” and “service” rather than academic performance. In my district we see a very significant number of scholarships go unused: the “citizenship” and “service” students either don’t make it to university or college, or don’t make it past the first semester. I’ve talked to many academic students about this and they are quite bitter. All I can say to them is “welcome to our anti-intellectual world” and encourage them to keep on working.
Finally, scholarships are now based in part on Gr. 10 and 11 exam marks. Not only are these marks suspect because they are marked by the schools themselves, but many students who will go beyond high school don’t have a firm commitment until Gr. 12. As such, the money that is available is often misdirected.
This question about changing our “scholarship and awards program to better reflect a more personalized learning environment” is irrelevant until a lot more money is available for the students who will actually use it.
C. Welch says:
“… scholarships are now based in part on Gr. 10 and 11 exam marks. …. but many students who will go beyond high school don’t have a firm commitment until Gr. 12.”
Well here’s what I have to say to that:
“Boo – hoo – hoo .. Am I to feel sorry for the arrogant, lazy, naturally-brilliant students who think they can effortlessly coast their way through Grades 9-11, not putting forth a strong effort until Grade 12 (the year that counts)? I myself (not naturally brilliant by any stretch) worked very hard each and every year (Grades 9-13), always achieving honour-roll status (usually Top 5 ranking). This came at great personal sacrifice (i.e., often locked-away in my room studying, while others were out ‘having fun’). In my opinion, it is students like myself who have demonstrated a strong sense of character and maturity, personal pride and self-discipline, and a solid and unwavering work ethic over an extended period of time (e.g., Gr 9-12) who deserve the scholarships and placements into this country’s finest universities and colleges/other. In fact, the University of Toronto (back in the late 1980s when I sought admittance) reviewed a student’s 5-year (Gr 9-13) highschool average in determining whether a student was worthy of admittance. This was a fair and sensible approach.
Well aren’t you a superstar Heather!?! Glad that was what you achieved as an individual student. What your rather self-important statement totally fails to acknowledge is that while it was what you did, every child/student develops at their own pace, in their own way, for different reasons. Willing them to be something they won’t be (and perhaps shouldn’t be) is a doomed path. Perhaps it did work for *you* 25 years ago – congrats. But a broader sensibility about how (and when) kids achieve would help in this discussion.
I will allow this post but ask us to please be respectful of everyone’s thoughts, opinions, and feelings here.
Thank you
I am somewhat opposed to scholarships on principle. The one exception that might be reasonable is to entice the very finest minds into wealth generating fields with a need for staff. (presently the best and the brightest might be given scholorships to study usefull things like mining or field petroleum engineering). Having student aid programs directed towards those that “earned” them through long term conformity is just another socialist scheme that needs to be avoided. Those that finish at the very top of the heap are the attractive ones that might be funded to generate wealth for Canada…