Course Challenge for Core & Options Courses

Families who desire to home educate their children do not have to give up on home education once their child reaches grade 10. Home education students who want to earn high school course credits and/or the high school diploma from the Alberta Education system have several choices, described below.

Important Details and Limitations:
We highly value and prioritize the integrity of our actions as they relate to following both the written rules from Alberta Ed regarding Course Challenges and also the professional expectations and norms that surround the acceptable practices related to Course Challenges.
-This opportunity for course challenges is available to only our home education students who are home educating with us.
-Students (and their parents) need to prepare during grade 9 for the three (or four) year process of earning the 100 specified/required course credits.
-Students need to plan to earn 30 to 35 credits per school year during each of the three years of high school (i.e. grades 10, 11, and 12). Plan to build your transcript one school year at a time. Don’t wait until grade 12 to begin this process. https://thee.ca/video-open-house/2023/08/04/course-challenges-prerequisite-courses/
-Our home education program will not accept nor submit the entirety of the 100 credits for a student in one academic year.
-The student and parent will need to discuss with our high school academic advisor beforehand the acceptability of submitting the entire sequence of 10-20-30 courses for credits during one school year.
-Students will write a challenge exam for the core courses, and they will provide a portfolio of learning samples for elective/options/CTS courses.
-We offer challenge exams for all of the core courses; we use portfolio review for Science 24.
-A student may challenge the CALM20 course only through our unique learning and assignment resource that the student will use and complete to meet the requirement of the portfolio assessment option. Contact us at exams@thee.ca for more information.
-A parent or student needs to contact THEE at the exams@thee.ca email address to ask us if we can support the elective/options/CTS courses that the student wants to challenge because we can’t provide portfolio assessment for all of the literal 100’s of CTS modules and some of the options courses. The, “Guide to Education”, policy document from Alberta Education requires that, “…a certified teacher who has expertise in the subject/course [emphasis ours]…”, provide the evaluation/assessment of the learning sample(s) that a student has provided for the course challenge, and to act honestly and with integrity, we cannot provide the required assessment for all of the 100’s of CTS modules and dozens of options courses.
-Students have the opportunity to earn and then use an,”External Credential”, to earn course/module credits for such subjects as computer networking, word processing, spreadsheets, website development, music and international languages.

Challenge Exam

Challenge exams are for core subjects such as math, language arts, science, and social studies. To prepare for the challenge exam, you need to first know what you need to study and learn. You can find out the course content on which the exam will be based by reading the official, “Course Description”, from Alberta Education, which you can find at the Alberta Education website (https://www.alberta.ca/programs-of-study.aspx) or by emailing us here at THEE at, exams@thee.ca.

You may find helpful learning resources, which are based on the Alberta Education course/curriculum, which we have identified for you and made available from our webpage, “Aligned Learning Resources”.

Once you’ve completed your study of the course content and are ready to write the challenge exam, please consider the exam preparation opportunity that you have via the web site of ExamBank.ca. THEE has an account at Exam Bank, so contact us at exams@thee.ca to ask for the login information that will give you access to the practice exams.

Preparing for the Challenge Exam
Two resources that are helpful but that are exam preparation resources and are not teaching/learning/assignments/answer-keys resources are
• The Key … series of exam preparation resources (http://castlerockresearch.com/the-key-study-guide)
• ExamBank.ca … a website for which THEE (and most schools in Alberta) has a subscription-based account (https://alberta.exambank.com). You will need to contact us at the office by email (exams@thee.ca) or by phone (780-467-5511) to receive the user name and password for THEE’s account at Exam Bank.

Scheduling the Challenge Exam
When you are ready to write the exam, your parent will need to send an email message to exams@thee.ca to tell us that you are ready to write a challenge exam. Your parent will need to include in that email message the following information: (1) name of the student and (2) exact name of the course to be challenged (e.g. English 10-1 or Math 20-3). Someone at THEE will reply to your parent to begin the process of scheduling the exam.

Portfolio Assessment

Important First Step: Once you have identified the options/elective course that you want to challenge, send an email message to exams@thee.ca to tell us at THEE the exact name of the course(s) and/or modules that you want to challenge by way of the portfolio assessment, and we will respond to you by sending to you a very helpful and detailed set of instructions that will get the ball rolling for your son or daughter to be able to successfully create the needed portfolio of learning samples.

NOTE: We cannot guarantee that we can support a course challenge for every course that is in the Program of Studies, so you need to follow this first step and contact us at exams@thee.ca to begin this process.

All of the following information is predicated on you contacting us at exams@thee.ca BEFORE you have begun your plans to challenge an elective/options course or module.

To prepare for the portfolio assessment, you need to first know what you need to study and learn. You can find out the course content on which the portfolio assessment will be based by reading the official, “Course Description”, from Alberta Education, which you can find at the Alberta Education website (https://www.alberta.ca/programs-of-study.aspx) or by emailing us here at THEE at, exams@thee.ca. You will use the, “Course Description”, document as your roadmap to find all of the content and “outcomes” that your son or daughter will need to learn in order to be prepared to successfully challenge the course.  During this learning process, your son or daughter will need to select samples of his or her “evidences of learning”, such as completed assignments, completed projects, video-recorded demonstrations, etc., which your son or daughter will include in his or her portfolio that you’ll send to us via exams@thee.ca.

IMPORTANT: Your son or daughter may challenge a course or module only once. This policy is from Alberta Education and not from THEE (see page 128 in the, Guide to Education). For this reason, you will be able to submit the portfolio once.  At the risk of sounding cold or harsh, I need to say that we in the office will not engage in a back-n-forth of email messages or phone calls with the parent to tell the parent (or student) what is missing or how to organize the learning samples in the portfolio. Remember, a course challenge means that the student believes that he or she has already learned the content/outcomes of the given course and wants to demonstrate that accomplishment. Being ready to challenge a course means that the student previously prepared to study the content of the course, has then completed that study and learning of the content, and is ready to send to us his or her “evidences of learning” in a well-organized portfolio.