High school students in British Columbia need to take provincial exams for graduation. The Ministry of Education and several third-party companies provide resources that 10th, 11th, and 12th graders can use to prepare for their BC Provincial Exams.
Parents and their children should start out by reviewing the exam specifications on the British Columbia Ministry of Education website. This is essentially an exam outline that tells you what will be tested on the BC Provincial Exam for the various subjects that form this overall high school testing system. For example, you can get specifications for 10th-grade students for Apprenticeship and Workplace Mathematics, Foundations of Mathematics and Pre-Calculus, English, English First Peoples, and Science. Use the link in the Resources section at the bottom of this article to find the Provincial Exam specifications.
BC Provincial Exams Practice Tests:
The Ministry of Education also provides some previous exams that were used in the past. These are not necessarily what you will see when you take your own tests but are representative of the types of questions you need to know how to answer. Thus, they are good for practice.
Learning Substantive Material for the Tests:
There really is no secret here. If you just use the textbooks that are used for the subjects pertaining to these British Columbia provincial exams to master the material, you are likely to be ahead of the pack. Tests like math are not going to have a lot of tricks, and you can generally learn the material directly from the textbooks. The same goes for science.
Now, subjects like reading and writing do take a bit more natural ability. The key here is to read as much as possible and practice your writing. Parents or teachers should construct several mock writing task and analyze a student’s essay writing skills. This includes organization and critical thinking skills. It takes some practice to use an analytical thought process and support an argument in an essay. Kids really just need to develop confidence and not worry so much about how persuasive their ideas come across. Rather, they should just learn how to express an opinion and give reasons for it even if it sounds a bit cheesy. Any opinion or analysis is sufficient if it is supported with sound reasons.
It is also helpful to look at the sample writing that was done by previous students. This will give kids a chance to start constructing ideas in their own head when it comes to writing. Have students write their own essay disagreeing with the writing sample to see if they can come up with their own unique analysis.
The Surrey Schools website also has a number of other links to help students prepare for the BC Provincial Exams. Use the link in the Resources below to access that list of exam preparation sources.
Resources:
Ministry of Education: BC Provincial Exam Specifications
Ministry of Education: BC Provincial Exams Practice Tests
British Columbia Provincial Exam Writing Samples
Surrey Schools: Exam Preparation Sources
