An estimated 8,000 high school students across Alberta were affected by a computer crash during their diploma exams earlier this month — but no Stettler students were among them.
Norbert Baharally, principal of William E. Hay Composite High School, said the interruption on Tuesday, Jan. 13 did not have any impact on his school’s students.
Alberta Education’s Quest A+ online exam system was being used to host the first part of the diploma exams for the English Language Arts 30-1 and 30-2 courses when it was the victim of an apparent server crash.
The server was reportedly overwhelmed and unable to accommodate all the students logging in to write the exam, according to a press release published on the Alberta Education website.
This led to delays and interruptions for thousands of students, but apparently high schoolers in Stettler did not suffer from any such problems.
“It did not affect us,” said Baharally, noting that almost all the William E. Hay students taking the exam chose to do so online, with the exception of one student who opted to complete the exam with pen and paper.
Students affected by the outage had the option of applying for a partial exemption before the deadline of Friday, Jan. 23, but still would have needed to complete the second half of the exam on the scheduled date of Tuesday, Jan. 20.
Another option would be to rewrite the first part of the exam in April or June. Those affected by the outage would have the usual rewrite fee waived by the province. Baharally said he understood that Alberta Education would need to offer a “blanket solution” that would be applicable to all students who were taking the exam at the time of the server crash, regardless of whether or not it had an impact on their marks.
“I haven’t seen anything from the government with regard to that,” he said. “We’re just waiting here for all the exams to be written up.”
The diploma exam for the English Language Arts courses makes up 50 per cent of the student’s final mark.
In Ponoka, Grade 12 student Karley Bodnarchuk said she was unable to log in to take the exam using a Google Chromebook supplied by the school.
“I freaked out a little bit,” she said. “I was just trying my best to just get my thoughts together.”
(Jeffrey Heyden-Kaye of Black Press contributed to this report)