The results of the ministerial exams last June, revealed Friday by the Ministry of Education, suggest growing difficulties in French and major disparities between the public and private networks after a school year cut short by strikes in the education sector.
In French, the success rate for the ministerial writing test in 5e secondary school enrollment stands at 70.8% across the province, a decrease of 4 percentage points compared to 2023 (74.8%).
In the public network, however, this rate stands at only 66.9%, also down from 2023 (71.1%).
The fall is a little less sharp in the private sector (83.3%), which lost three percentage points compared to the previous year (86.8%).
The results of the ministerial science exam in 4e Secondary school success rates have also fallen drastically. In just one year, the success rate has fallen from 74.5% to 60.4%, a decrease of 14 percentage points, across the entire Quebec network.
A slight drop is also to be reported in the history exam of Quebec and Canada in 4e secondary. In total, 78.5% of Quebec students passed in 2024, a drop of 1.9 points compared to 2023.
These ministerial exams were held at the end of a school year marked in several regions by a teachers’ strike. In the Montreal region, students affected by the Fédération autonome de l’enseignement (FAE) strike last fall missed about a month of school. The Common Front strike lasted a total of eight days.
The ministerial exams scheduled for January in primary and secondary schools had to be postponed, as had the end-of-year evaluations. The Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, also implemented a $300 million catch-up plan, which, according to data provided by Quebec, allowed 175,000 students to benefit from tutoring services and 158,000 young people to receive an educational support service.
Added to this are two school years (2020 and 2021) that were jeopardized by school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ministry of Education does not keep statistics on the success rate for these two years.
Positive results in mathematics and English
If the indicators are in the red in French, it is quite the opposite in mathematics. The ministerial mathematics test in 4e secondary school, essential for obtaining a high school diploma, was successfully completed by 78.1% of Quebec students, a jump of almost eight percentage points compared to 2023 (70.6%).
Here again, success is lower in the public sector (76.6%, + 7.5) than in the private network (90.7%, + 7.6).
English as a second language results are also slightly up in the core 5 programe secondary (92.6%, +0.4), while they are stable in the enriched program (97.8%, -0.1).