Writing Diploma Exams  |  About Grade 12 Diploma Exams

NOTE: On August 1st, some students’ diploma examinations were disrupted by the water main break in Edmonton, Alberta. While these types of unfortunate incidents happen from time to time, Alberta Education has procedures in place with school authorities to ensure students are treated fairly. The writing centres affected by the service outage were contacted immediately by Alberta Education and we are ensuring that we can take each students’ unique circumstances into account. Alberta Education is committed to ensuring students are not disadvantaged by events completely out of their control.

Affected students will have the option to re-write the portion of their exam that was interrupted, or seek an exemption to that portion of the exam. If students feel they completed most of their exam, and are happy with it, they can have the answers they completed marked. The mark they receive on what they completed will count as the full mark for that section of their exam. These decisions will be guided by what is in the best interests of the impacted students.

Students with questions are encouraged to contact Alberta Education directly at Special.Cases@gov.ab.ca or by phone at 780-492-1400.

What are diploma exams?

Diploma exams are administered to students in select grade 12 courses. They have three main purposes:

• to certify the level of individual student achievement in selected grade 12 courses
• to ensure that province-wide standards of achievement are maintained
• to report individual and group results

Dates

Diploma exams are administered annually in January, April, June, August, and November.

For more information on the 2018-19 dates, you can see the "schedule" section here, or go to the General Information Bulletin for more.

Courses

The program has diploma exams in English and in French in selected Grade 12 courses:

• Biology 30
• Chemistry 30
• English Language Arts 30–1
• English Language Arts 30–2
• Français 30–1
• French Language Arts 30–1
• Mathematics 30–1
• Mathematics 30–2
• Physics 30
• Science 30
• Social Studies 30–1
• Social Studies 30–2

Practice Questions or Exemplars

Before writing diploma exams, students can try out the released questions from previous diploma exams. 

For more information, see "Exemplars".

Results

Student results are available on myPass approximately 3 weeks after the administration of diploma exams.