PASI Credential Overview

A Credential is a printed document that a student works towards through a school within their high school years. Once the student becomes eligible for a high school credential, it is awarded to the student by Alberta Education resulting in the student receiving a printed document acknowledging their achievements. Another word for a credential is “diploma” or “certificate”.

PASI tracks information regarding two different types of “Credentials”:

Defining Credentials

A list of Credential Types that have been or are currently awarded by Alberta Education is as follows:

The individual requirements that the student must meet to be awarded with a credential are outlined in the current https://www.alberta.ca/guide-to-education.

Credentials have the following structure.

See PASI Credential Management Details for more information about adding/modifying/deleting credential definitions moving forward. This includes:

Achieving Credentials

How Does A Student Get a Credential?

Option A: The student completes their school work, schools submit school marks and diploma exam marks are received by Alberta Education. From these, Official Marks are calculated which get considered in the calculation towards credential eligibility.

Option B: The student requests a High School Equivalency Diploma - Alternate 1 to the School or a Ministry user and that user completes the application process in PASIprep: Application for High School Equivalency Diploma - Alternative 1.

Where a student has met all requirements to achieve a credential, Alberta Education will consider awarding that student with the credential that they have achieved.

As the student completes their high school work and meets at least the minimum requirements for a credential, PASI assesses the student's progress towards each credential.

For each student, Alberta Education maintains records in PASI of the Student's progress towards the Credentials that apply to them. The following student data is calculated and stored:

As a student is working towards their credential, their progress can be tracked by Student, Public and Admin myPass users using:

Available FromScreenStudentPublicAdmin
myPassView CredentialsYYY
View Document Order History1)YYY
Credential Requirement Checklist (PDF)YYY

The student credential progress may also be monitored by School and Ministry users via PASIprep using:

Credentials have multiple layers of “statuses” across the various levels of credential details:

For a summary of how the various credential statuses are reflected across the PASI screens and documents, refer to PASI Credential Status Overview.

The Student Credential Requirements must all be met (with can be done by achieving the requirement via their school record OR by receiving approval to be exempt from a requirement) for at least one Student Credential Requirement Set related to a credential for the student to be eligible to be awarded the credential (also referred to as “achieved” the credential).

Requirements Achievement

Each Credential Requirement has been implemented in 1 of 2 ways:

  1. A system-calculated achievement
    1. Each Credential Type has a set of requirements and many of those requirements are met when the certain coursework has been complete.
    2. View the Credential Requirement Course Mapping for more details.
    3. In the case of system-calculated credential requirements, PASI will determine if these credentials are achieved or not and update the status accordingly.
  2. A manual assessment of achievement

Requirements Exemption

Credential requirements may be exempted where a School or Ministry user chooses to remove the requirement to meet a particular requirement via an Exemption Reasons. An exemption will be of one of the following types.

The user may request and approve a Student Credential Requirement Exemption via the the Edit Credential Requirement Exemption PASIprep screen.

Access to request or approve exemptions is complex in that there are multiple checks that occur. Certain Exemption Reason types are available based on the user's permissions and the credential requirement itself.

Awarding Credentials

Award Credential Number

Once a student has achieved all credential requirements for at least 1 credential requirement set of a credential, Student Records awards the credential to the student. They can do this from PASIprep as a:

Awarding the credential to the student generates a unique Credential Number and stores the student's awarding information that will be printed on the resulting printed credential. This information is stored by Alberta Education in an Awarded Student Credential record, representing the awarded credential information for the student.

To generate a printed credential, the awarded credential must be ordered. Student Records may choose not to order the credential at the time of awarding and may order from the View Awarded Credential screen at a later date and time.

Re-Issuing A Credential Number

Where a credential has been awarded to the student and a piece of data 2) must be updated on the printed credential, the Student Records user may Re-Issue the credential to the student using the PASIprep Edit Awarded Credential screen.

Re-issuing occurs where the student's name and/or school year is updated on an Credential Number (Awarded Student Credential) record. This generates a new credential number and captures new “point in time” awarding information for that student(which will be included on the Printed Credential Document). This instance of the awarded credential becomes the Active Credential Number for that student.

Much like the initial awarding, re-issuing a credential must be followed by ordering to get the Printed Credential Document to the student, but this is an optional step that may be completed at a later date and time.

Receiving Printed Credentials

Refer to the Document Orders Overview for details on ordering, processing and delivery of a credential.

Specific to credentials, the Credential content is printed on the Alberta Education approved Credential paper, which has multiple security features built into the paper such as:

  • Microprint text
  • Watermark of the Alberta Government logo
  • Security feature descriptions on the back of the paper

Miscellaneous

Terminology

Business Objects

Business Processes

Services

Processor

PASIprep Functionality

myPass Functionality

Documents

1)
This screen provides the student with the ability to see all credential orders along with their other document orders.
2)
E.g., the student's has completed a legal name change and has requested their new name to be on their Credential or the awarded school year requires correction