In today’s newspaper there is some discussion of credit mills, which are schools that seem to give high marks for low quality academic work. The Star has been following this news for awhile, and even had a reporter go undercover to demonstrate her ability to get a good mark for poor academic achievement.

Now the universities and colleges are asking that the name of the school be added to the transcript when the school is marked “P” for private.

This fascinates me. Many years ago the universities in Ontario had a crib sheet of school names and grade adjustment amounts. This was to allow schools with easy marks to have their students discounted against schools with hard marks.

The colleges and universities are interested in real academic ability. Apparently high school transcripts are less than ideally indicative.

So now for the dumb questions:

• Why is the name of the school not on all transcripts?
• Is the name of the school on non-private transcripts now?
• If it is not, when was the practice changed, and why?

and finally

• Why are the final exams not common to all, province-wide (even better, country-wide), and done under controlled conditions with non-school employees as observers?
• Who benefits from the current conditions of unique exams, potentially uncontrolled test-writing conditions, and school anonymity?