As the end of the semester comes, students will be preparing for provincial diploma exams.
Most students will be stressed out, cramming, and might even pay for diploma preparation courses. However, an increasing number of students are using Aptitude to study for diploma exams.
Aptitude is an e-learning app that offers interactive games, exercises, articles, and videos for subjects such as chemistry, mathematics, and social studies. It also offers quizzes, unit and final exams that are 100% aligned with the Alberta curriculum.
Jason Arnades, a grade 12 student attending Lillian Osborne, used Aptitude to study for his English 30-1 and Social 30-1 diploma exams. He's attributed Aptitude as part of his success for performing well on his diploma exams.
"Before Aptitude, I would feel so uncomfortable with writing because I was never sure what to write. Now I use it fairly often and it gives me helpful tips and suggestions while I'm writing for language arts and social."
Aptitude has a rubric check for writing assignments and the rubric check will assess each writing assignment differently based on whether the text is a personal response, critical response, source analysis, or position paper.
Jason scored 83% on his English 30-1 diploma exam and 91% on his Social 30-1 diploma exam. His coursework mark was 87% in English 30-1 and 96% in Social 30-1.
Social and English are considered to be the most difficult subjects to score above 80% on a diploma exam. For the 2018-2019 school year, only 17.0% of students scored above 80% on the Social Studies 30-1 diploma exam and 12.3% of students scored above 80% on the English Language Arts 30-1 diploma exam. The overall average score for students who took the English 30-1 diploma exam was 64.4% and 69.8% for students who took the Social 30-1 diploma exam.
Dwayne Gerald, an exam manager, and social studies teacher expresses that the Alberta education system isn't doing enough to help students' proficiency in language arts and social.
"Students perform a lot better on math, biology, chemistry, and physics diploma exams. But the Alberta government also needs to focus more on improving students' proficiency in humanities."
For the 2018-2019 school year, 13.4% of students who wrote the Social 30-1 diploma and 13.2% of students who wrote the English 30-1 diploma didn't receive a passing grade.
"I appreciate Aptitude for going so many steps ahead compared to other e-learning apps. I encourage my students to use it when our assignments involve writing. Before Aptitude, the class average for a position paper was 57%. Now that most of my students use the app, the class average for our most recent position paper was 74%," Gerald said.
If you would like to download Aptitude, it is available on desktop, the App Store, Google Play Store, and Windows Store.
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