Forget Exams. Let’s Test Soft Skills Instead.
Every school year culminates in exam week—a notoriously unforgiving period where students cram, write feverishly in echoing gyms, then leave hoping for the best until report cards land. It’s an archaic system that leaves kids without any room to learn from their mistakes—or to even see where they went wrong.
I’ve spent more than 25 years in Ontario’s public school system: first as an elementary teacher and special education resource teacher, then as a principal, and now as associate director of the Simcoe County District School Board. I’ve seen how that narrow scope and one-size-fits-all model of traditional exams limits learning and leaves teachers frustrated. When I was a superintendent of education, every July I’d receive anxious calls from students and parents questioning their marks, confused as to why their grade didn’t reflect their effort. Without first-hand knowledge of the student’s history or their coursework, the school principal could only offer a semblance of guidance and readjust their grades from a distance. It never felt fair to the teachers or helpful to the students.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, traditional in-person exams became impossible, and we had to confront how we evaluate learning and who the system genuinely served. Our assessment models were clearly built for another era—one that’s heavily focused on memorization and learning standard knowledge geared toward a single, university-bound pathway. The way we access and use knowledge has shifted. Today’s students have 24/7 access to information through the internet, which makes rote memorization far less relevant.
What’s more useful to students is learning how to evaluate the credibility of information and apply knowledge practically. After high school, they’ll enter a world full of diverse career paths. There’s college and university, but there’s also direct entry to trades, entrepreneurship, apprenticeship, public service and so many others. Every job requires these soft skills, and critical thinking and discernment are more valuable than ever before with rampant misinformation online. Traditional exams are good for some, but they’re often the wrong way to assess people today.
At Simcoe County, we’ve broadened our approach, giving teachers more freedom to choose assessment styles that better match their students’ needs. Instead of “exams” we now use the term “culminating tasks,” which are worth up to 30 per cent of a student’s grade and happen in a scheduled two-hour block. The name change may seem like a small shift, but teachers have told me the messaging has given them more confidence and liberty to create projects that best showcase their students.
For something like calculus, where timed problem-solving reflects real-world expectations, our teachers can still use traditional sit-down tests as the culminating task, but they have the option to choose alternatives. For example, in a geography class, teachers might ask students to create an infographic on climate change, which helps them learn how to prioritize key information and develop visual communication skills. In a social studies class, they could assign a student-led seminar on equity and justice to develop leadership and topic confidence. Both of these examples would replace a question-and-answer exam and better reflect what the course content is best suited to do. What matters to us isn’t the format. We care about fairness, equity and equipping kids with the pragmatic skills they need for adulthood.
Since launching the tasks in 2022, we’ve continually refined their rollout based on feedback from teachers, parents, guardians and students. In the first year, teachers decided when and how to run culminating tasks. Instead of a special exam week, the tasks took place on a regular school day. The following year, we dedicated culminating tasks days that had 75-minute blocks to help students manage their study time. This year, we’ve adjusted once again so that culminating task days happen at the end of each semester with a 120-minute block, and this is what we’ll be sticking with going forward.
Instead of relying on a single product to judge a student’s success, like an exam or an essay, we’ve incorporated “triangulation,” a practice recommended by Ontario’s education policy, “Growing Success.” This means teachers also assess learning through conversations and observations. That might mean listening to a student explain their thinking and noting how they apply feedback over time, or observing how they solve problems in the classroom. For example, if a shy student makes an effort to add their ideas in group work after teacher feedback, that can be incorporated into their final culminating task evaluation.
Changing the assessment was only one part of our renovation. We also introduced Feedback, Recovery and Improvement Days—dedicated time for students to receive meaningful feedback and clarify misunderstandings that happen after culminating tasks, all before the end of the semester. Imagine a student who’s planning to pursue automotive technology after high school but didn’t perform well on the culminating task in English. Rather than simply having them redo the assignment, their teacher might help them draw connections between English and the student’s interests. They might collaborate on a follow-up task where the student applies English to a real-world setting that feels relevant, like writing a repair guide or a proposal for a custom garage startup. If the teacher sees the student demonstrate genuine effort and progress, grades can be adjusted. It’s hard to escape grade chasing in a world where we like to boil down merit into a number, but the goal isn’t better student grades, it’s better student learning.
In our classrooms, we encourage co-constructing assignments with students. In advance of an assignment, teachers can work with students to develop what success should look like, ensuring that students have a clear understanding of expectations. For instance, during a Grade 10 English class, a teacher and students might jointly create a rubric for a persuasive essay, discussing what constitutes a strong argument, effective organization and proper grammar. It’s a way to not only create clear expectations, but also foster a sense of collaboration and accountability, again something that aligns more with real-world working environments.
Some parents have worried that removing traditional exams would lower academic standards. Our goal isn’t to lessen expectations; it’s to assess a fuller range of skills. Others have voiced concerns about university readiness—will students be prepared for post-secondary environments that still use final written exams? The answer is yes. We’re preparing kids not only to take tests when needed, but to problem-solve, adapt, and communicate—skills they’ll need far beyond the classroom.
At the end of the day our critical question remains. Who is this system working for? For decades, exams went unquestioned. We’re still making minor tweaks based on community feedback, but what’s emerging in the Simcoe County education system is a model that reflects the future we want for education: student-centred, teacher-led, and aligned with the adult world to come, and I’m proud to be part of publicly funded education and our students’ future.
—As told to Lindsey King
