Technolandy

Day 134 (of 2025/26) Back to the Future? Or Inspired by Playoffs? – Ontario Education Edition

New for 2026/27… a return to 1967.

Inspired, perhaps, by playoff season, Ontario is bringing back the idea that learning culminates in a final exam — a single, time-bound performance on what someone else has decided is “most important.”

Because if 30% of the grade lives in the final exam, why wouldn’t students focus there? The “game of school” now has a clear strategy: participate just enough (10–15%), show up (10%), and save your energy for the big game.

And with that… the most important learning question makes its comeback: “Will this be on the test?”

The Breakdown:

Attendance: 10% Participation: up to 15% Final Exam: 30% Everything else: 45%?

So less than half of a student’s grade is tied to actual learning experiences. The rest? Compliance, performance, and recall under pressure.

Some questions…

Are these final exams common or personalized?

Because we’ve known for a while that exams don’t measure learning nearly as well as they measure test-taking.

Are lesson plans now going to be standardized?

Ministry-approved resources, assessments, even lessons themselves. The idea that a classroom in Etobicoke should look identical to one in Sioux Lookout might sound equitable… but real learning has never been one-size-fits-all.

Who decides what “counts” as participation?

Who benefits from that definition?

And who gets left out?

There’s also something quietly ironic here. If this model is so effective, maybe we should see it elsewhere.

* Weekly quizzes in parliament.

* A final exam before any legislative break.

* No notes for speeches. No prompts. Just recall under pressure.

Because if test-taking is a life skill… surely it applies beyond classrooms.

But the bigger question lingers:

Why are we doubling down on short-term memory over long-term understanding?

Why elevate recall over application, compliance over curiosity?

This doesn’t feel like preparing students for 2027.

It feels like preparing them for a system that already exists… or existed… and asking them not to question it.

And maybe that’s the real shift.

Because when students are trained to ask “Will this be on the test?” we’ve already answered a much more important question: What matters most? (Spoiler: not Learning)

And if it is about the final exam, why bother with anything else the rest of the term? Just teach the factoids for the exam and practice answering those types of questions all term long. No need for hands on experiments or presentations or edited work cuz that’s not on the standardized final exams…