Alberta Diploma Exams 2026-27: What They Are Worth, and When They Run

What a diploma exam is, and who writes one

A diploma exam is written by Alberta Education and Childcare rather than by your child's teacher. It is set province-wide, marked centrally, and blended into the course mark. It is marked by teachers at a central location, with the school's name and the student's name removed first, and the written parts are marked independently by two or more markers. A school's own final exam is a different thing, and a school can hold both.

Every student registered in a diploma exam course is expected to write the diploma exam in order to complete the course. Diploma courses are required components of the Alberta High School Diploma.

Four groups may write one: students who have finished instruction in a diploma exam course, students who want to improve a mark in one, mature students, and non-funded visiting students. A mature student is someone who, as of 1 September of the current school year, is 19 or older, or already holds a high school diploma.

Students must bring photo identification to write.

Your school registers your child for a first sitting. It does not register them for a repeat. A student retaking a course or rewriting an exam has to register themselves through myPass.

The twelve courses, and the three French ones people mix up

Diploma exams exist for these twelve courses, and no others:

• 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

Every diploma exam except the two English Language Arts ones is translated into French, and a student in a francophone or alternative French language program may write in either language whatever the language of instruction was. If your child studied the course in French and intends to write in English, the principal needs 90 days' notice.

The three French course names are the part parents get wrong, and the distinction decides whether there is an exam at all.

French 30 is a second-language course for students who are not francophone. There is no diploma exam for French 30.

French Language Arts 30-1 is an advanced French course for students in an alternative French language program. It has a diploma exam, and writing it is required to get a final course mark.

Français 30-1 is a French language and literature course for students in a francophone program. It also has a diploma exam, likewise required.

What the exam is actually worth

Thirty per cent. Seventy per cent of the final mark comes from coursework, and the remaining 30 per cent comes from the diploma exam. To pass the course, a student needs a combined final mark of at least 50 per cent.

Alberta's own worked example: a school mark of 68 per cent and a diploma exam mark of 60 per cent give an official final mark of 66 per cent.

This is the number most likely to be wrong wherever you read it, so it is worth knowing why. The weighting was cut to 10 per cent for 2021-22 and 20 per cent for 2022-23 during the pandemic, then returned to 30 per cent on 1 September 2023. It has been 30 per cent every year since, and the list of changes at the front of the 2026-27 bulletin does not include it.

Two details that only appear in the fine print.

Alberta does not issue a final mark of 48 or 49 per cent. A student may earn 48 or 49 from the school or on the exam, but a blended final mark of 48 or 49 is raised to 50. A blend of 47.5 rounds to 48 first, then rises to 50.

Mature students are blended differently. A mature student is not required to have a school mark at all. If they have one and it is lower than the diploma exam mark, the final mark is the exam mark alone. If the school mark is higher, the two are blended 70/30 as usual. This exception belongs to mature students only. For a student enrolled in the course in the ordinary way, the exam mark is always blended in, whether it helps or not.

When the exams run in 2026-27

Five sittings. These are administration windows rather than single days, and your child's own exam dates sit inside them.

The register-by column matters only if your child is registering themselves, which means a rewrite or a retake. The school handles a first sitting.

One line in the schedule is worth reading twice, because it sits above every sitting in the bulletin and is easy to miss: all students are given up to double the listed time if they need it. That is not an accommodation a family has to apply for. It is how the exams are timed.

From this school year, students write diploma exams on a digital platform rather than on paper. Alberta has moved its provincial assessments online, supported by An Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms and Amend the Education Act, 2026, which takes effect on proclamation. Alberta's page still describes that proclamation as anticipated for 1 September 2026, and had not updated the wording when this page was checked on 18 September 2026.

Rewrites, rescores, and the fee two government pages disagree about

These are two different things and they cost the same.

A rewrite means sitting the exam again at a later administration. There is no stated limit on how many times. A student may rewrite without repeating the course, and may repeat the course without rewriting. If the exam has two parts, both parts must be written in the same sitting to earn credit. A new transcript shows only the highest school mark and the highest exam mark earned, so a worse rewrite does not replace a better first attempt on the transcript.

A rescore means the same paper, marked again. The original marks are deleted and teachers remark it without seeing them. Only the written component is rescored, not the machine-marked part. The rescore mark stands as final whether it goes up, down or nowhere, which is the part worth pausing on before requesting one. The deadline is printed on the student's Results Statement, and the dates for this year are in the table above.

The fee for either is $35.00 including GST per exam, for Alberta resident students and for mature students. For non-funded visiting students it is $55. A rescore fee is refunded if the mark rises by 5 per cent or more.

Here the government contradicts itself. Alberta's writing-diploma-exams page, read on 18 September 2026, still says $26.25 for a rewrite or rescore and $50.00 for non-funded visiting students. The 2026-27 General Information Bulletin, published by the same department for this school year, marks its fee section as new and sets those amounts at $35.00 and $55. The bulletin governs this year, so budget for $35.00, and expect the older figure to keep appearing on pages that copied it.

Accommodations: the test is what your child already uses in class

Alberta does not sort exam accommodations by diagnosis. It sorts them by whether the support is already in routine use.

Regular accommodations are handled by the school, with no application to Alberta Education at all. The condition is that the student regularly uses the accommodation for classroom work or assessments. The named ones include text-to-speech, a scribe, large print, Braille, a reader, a sign language interpreter and speech-to-text. Each has its own rules. A scribe, for example, may not reword an answer, correct grammar or ask leading questions.

Unique accommodations are anything a student uses in class that is not on that list. Those go to Alberta Education's Special Cases and Accommodations Team through an application.

This matters because the Ontario framing does not transfer. The bulletin does not name an Individual Program Plan as the qualifying document, and it does not create a separate provision for students learning English as an additional language. In practice a child's regular classroom accommodations are usually recorded in their plan, which is how the school evidences routine use. But the question the school is answering is "does this student use it every day", not "what is the diagnosis".

Students in home education programs, and mature students not enrolled with a high school, are entitled to accommodations too. They have to contact the principal of the writing centre directly, before the sitting, to arrange them.

The plain-language version on Alberta's own parent page is short: accommodations may include audio versions, large print and Braille, and you start by talking to the principal or school counsellor.

What the mark affects

The final blended mark is the mark that counts for the course, and diploma courses are required for the Alberta High School Diploma. So the exam reaches the diploma through the course mark rather than as a separate hurdle. There is no pass or fail on the diploma exam by itself, unlike Ontario's literacy test.

It also reaches money. The Alexander Rutherford Scholarship pays $700 for a Grade 12 average of 75.0 to 79.9 per cent across five designated courses, and $1,300 for an average of 80 per cent or higher. Those five must include a core literacy course and at least two from a list that is made up almost entirely of diploma exam courses, so the blended marks are the ones counted. Averages are not rounded up when eligibility is worked out, which is the opposite of the course rounding rule above. The 2026-27 application is open.

For province-wide context, 82.0 per cent of Alberta students reached the acceptable standard on diploma exams in 2024-25 and 23.0 per cent reached the standard of excellence, up from 81.5 and 22.6 the year before.

What Alberta gives you to practise with, free

More than most parents realise, and none of it costs anything.

Alberta Education publishes, per subject: guides for students, exemplars of student writing with practice questions, released items going back years for several courses, information bulletins explaining what each exam assesses, scoring guides, a formula sheet for Mathematics 30-1 and 30-2, and a data booklet for the sciences. New this year, practice tests sit inside the digital assessment platform students now write on, which matters more than it sounds: practising on the interface removes one of the things that makes the real sitting feel harder than it is.

One rule to check before exam day. A student may use only one calculator, scientific or graphing, and only a model Alberta Education has approved.

How this differs from Ontario, if you have moved

Parents arriving from Ontario tend to map the wrong thing onto it.

Ontario's provincial testing lands at two moments. There is a Grade 9 mathematics assessment, and there is the OSSLT, a literacy test with an actual pass that a student has to clear to earn the Ontario Secondary School Diploma. If you want the Ontario detail, the OSSLT explained and the EQAO practice tests page cover it.

Alberta spreads the same idea across a whole final year instead. Each of the twelve Grade 12 courses listed above carries its own exam worth 30 per cent of that course. None of them is pass or fail on its own, and no single one of them stands between a student and the diploma. A student who does badly on one does not fail to graduate because of it. They carry the result into the course mark, and that is the mark the official transcript shows and the mark a scholarship average is built from. So the Ontario instinct to brace for one big test does not transfer. In Alberta the thing to plan for is how many diploma courses your child is carrying at once.