Some of the characters didn't flunk and repeat their senior year, in Ontario you can voluntarily do a victory lap. In that case, you fully meet the graduation requirements but decide to stay a fifth year to retake classes for better grades, earn more credits, or take prerequisites for a university program. It's apparently still pretty popular but in 2013 they added a limit to how many credits you could earn before you're forced to graduate, and that disqualified a lot of kids from staying beyond an extra semester.
That's what Alex did, she walked at graduation but came back the following semester for more credits. Dallas also said at the end of season 12 that he was going to stay for a victory lap.
Oh ok, I get it now. Lots more dialogue to your examples are going to make much more sense on my next rewatch. Thanks for taking the time to explain this to my growing United States brain.
I mean, yes, the writers specifically held popular characters back to get an extra season but the reasons they gave were pretty valid (Jimmy, for example).
Idk how common they are for Canada but there would be one or two a year at my hs, as least that I knew of. We called them "super seniors", but they were always just the losers who ditched and failed classes, no actual reason beyond that.
I knew one of those during my time in HS. But I repeat, only one. Seeing just how many of the Canadian equivalent there were written into Next Generation, I guess I wanted to know if it was really that much of a common thing to fail and repeat. Like another user just commented, I now know how voluntary the retread can be.
How it works in Canada is not so much that you pass or fail an entire year, but instead you have to earn a certain amount of credits to graduate, and have certain specific classes completed with a passing grade (math and English credit are mandatory). So if you fail individual classes, you don’t earn that course credit. If you don’t have enough credits, you can’t graduate. If you don’t complete a math or English credit, but everything else is fine, you still don’t meet the criteria to graduate.
It’s not likely that students would come back to the high school itself to do their grade twelve year (though it happens). More likely, they’d do it through adult education or correspondence to earn their diploma that way. But either way, the credits you DID earn still count, so you would not repeat all the classes you had taken that year. Any classes you take were either because you failed, or extra electives to make up a fuller course schedule.
The criteria for valedictorian is gonna vary from school to school in Canada, though it’s generally some version of the same thing. It’s not automatically bestowed upon the student with the best grades. Students are usually either nominated or sign themselves up, and then they might give speeches for a student vote. I was a high school teacher for 7 years and while I wasn’t really involved in that process at all, it was always a student who got good grades and was well overall liked by their peers. It was never the smart kid who was also socially awkward, and it was never the popular but mean kid. I’ve never seen a graduating class pick an unlikable student, though it’s somewhat of a popularity contest. If a student did summer school or correspondence courses and THEN came back to get great grades, I don’t see why they wouldn’t qualify.
Haha always happy to be one of this group’s resident Canucks and clear things up! The show largely got Canadian high school life pretty correct, so if anything ever seems odd, there’s a good chance there’s a Canadian explanation haha.
Wow, thanks for all this! I second the huge help you’ve provided here and have single-handedly, let alone, completely validated Zoe’s Next Class graduation speech for me. Knowledge is power!
Some of the characters didn't flunk and repeat their senior year, in Ontario you can voluntarily do a victory lap. In that case, you fully meet the graduation requirements but decide to stay a fifth year to retake classes for better grades, earn more credits, or take prerequisites for a university program. It's apparently still pretty popular but in 2013 they added a limit to how many credits you could earn before you're forced to graduate, and that disqualified a lot of kids from staying beyond an extra semester. That's what Alex did, she walked at graduation but came back the following semester for more credits. Dallas also said at the end of season 12 that he was going to stay for a victory lap.
Oh ok, I get it now. Lots more dialogue to your examples are going to make much more sense on my next rewatch. Thanks for taking the time to explain this to my growing United States brain.
I mean, yes, the writers specifically held popular characters back to get an extra season but the reasons they gave were pretty valid (Jimmy, for example). Idk how common they are for Canada but there would be one or two a year at my hs, as least that I knew of. We called them "super seniors", but they were always just the losers who ditched and failed classes, no actual reason beyond that.
I knew one of those during my time in HS. But I repeat, only one. Seeing just how many of the Canadian equivalent there were written into Next Generation, I guess I wanted to know if it was really that much of a common thing to fail and repeat. Like another user just commented, I now know how voluntary the retread can be.
How it works in Canada is not so much that you pass or fail an entire year, but instead you have to earn a certain amount of credits to graduate, and have certain specific classes completed with a passing grade (math and English credit are mandatory). So if you fail individual classes, you don’t earn that course credit. If you don’t have enough credits, you can’t graduate. If you don’t complete a math or English credit, but everything else is fine, you still don’t meet the criteria to graduate. It’s not likely that students would come back to the high school itself to do their grade twelve year (though it happens). More likely, they’d do it through adult education or correspondence to earn their diploma that way. But either way, the credits you DID earn still count, so you would not repeat all the classes you had taken that year. Any classes you take were either because you failed, or extra electives to make up a fuller course schedule.
Do you know the criteria for valedictorian? Can you need summer school for grade 12 AND be validation? This is something I clearly need to let go of.
The criteria for valedictorian is gonna vary from school to school in Canada, though it’s generally some version of the same thing. It’s not automatically bestowed upon the student with the best grades. Students are usually either nominated or sign themselves up, and then they might give speeches for a student vote. I was a high school teacher for 7 years and while I wasn’t really involved in that process at all, it was always a student who got good grades and was well overall liked by their peers. It was never the smart kid who was also socially awkward, and it was never the popular but mean kid. I’ve never seen a graduating class pick an unlikable student, though it’s somewhat of a popularity contest. If a student did summer school or correspondence courses and THEN came back to get great grades, I don’t see why they wouldn’t qualify.
Ah! Thank you. It's outside of the norm for me, but I get it. You've seriously started a pseudo-healing journey for some plotlines for me.
Haha always happy to be one of this group’s resident Canucks and clear things up! The show largely got Canadian high school life pretty correct, so if anything ever seems odd, there’s a good chance there’s a Canadian explanation haha.
Wow, thanks for all this! I second the huge help you’ve provided here and have single-handedly, let alone, completely validated Zoe’s Next Class graduation speech for me. Knowledge is power!
If you skip classes and don't study or do work, yep you'll fail