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Pushing through a fourth year of high school to improve her grades is not where Laaryssa Nicols saw herself a year ago.

The 18-year-old Ross Sheppard High School student thought she’d be adjusting to university life and enrolled in kinesiology at the University of Alberta. That changed when her 80 per cent average was one percentage point shy of the grade she needed to be admitted to the program in 2016.

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“I think I panicked,” she said of the day she heard that she’d missed the mark. “I didn’t really have a Plan B.”

Now she’s back at Ross Sheppard for an extra year, trying to raise her math and social studies grades to be more competitive when she applies again.

Science teacher Mike Tachynski, who taught Nicols, said worthy students are unfairly shut out of post-secondary programs because of grade inflation — a practice where some teachers give students marks higher than they have earned or overestimate their grasp of the material.

The proof, he told the Edmonton Public school board in the three minutes he was allotted to speak at its Jan. 31 meeting, is in the sometimes massive gaps between Grade 12 students’ grades assigned by classroom teachers and their results on provincial diploma exams.