Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have several areas that I would like to ask the Minister some questions about. The first one is something that I have raised in the House, I think it has been a couple of weeks at least now since I asked the Minister questions about graduation rates. I have yet to date to receive a response. I did go on-line and also called a school the day of asking the question and get the answers for myself some short hours later, but I still have not heard back from the Minister on it.
Really my concern was about the fact that we seem to do a lot of touting of our graduation rates. We talk a lot about the fact that graduation rates have improved since grade extensions, we are going in the right direction, and yes, this is a slow process, making progress, but we are making progress and we are going the right way.
My concern is that graduation rates may be going up, but I ask myself, what does graduation really mean? I think a lot of people these days are concerned about this. We like to compare ourselves to other jurisdictions but I am not certain that we are comparing apples to apples. I found out that our graduation requirements are not quite the same as Alberta's, whom we often compare ourselves to.
I did ask the Minister questions about whether we really did have to pass diploma examinations in order to graduate. From all that I can tell and from all the research I have done, Mr. Chairman, although the Minister has not provided me an answer yet, the answer is no, we do not. It is about blended marks between your term mark and your graduation mark.
It seems to me, theoretically, I could have a term mark from my school of 90 percent. As long as I score 10 percent on the Alberta-based diploma, I am going to get that 50 percent and I am going to move on and we are going to say I graduated and everybody is happy and we can chalk up another graduation stat.
Even further to that, Mr. Chairman, I believe that if you get a 48 percent blended mark, we bump you over the bar. I have concerns about this. I am wondering if the Minister could address them and specifically speak to whether or not we do indeed require our students to actually pass those diploma examinations. Thank you.