Guide for Ontario parents
OSSD Graduation Requirements: The 30 Credits Explained
The Ontario Secondary School Diploma has three requirements. Students meet almost all of them by simply attending school and passing courses — but the ones that get missed tend to be missed late, when they are hardest to fix.
The 30 credits
A student needs 30 credits: 18 compulsory and 12 optional. The compulsory 18 are four English credits (one per grade), three mathematics credits with at least one in Grade 11 or 12, two science, one Canadian history, one Canadian geography, one arts, one health and physical education, one French, plus half credits in civics and career studies, and three grouped electives.
Each credit represents roughly 110 hours of scheduled instruction, and a course must be passed at 50 percent or above to earn it.
The literacy requirement
Students normally write the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) in Grade 10. Those who do not pass may rewrite it, or take OLC4O, the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Course, which satisfies the requirement instead.
This is a graduation requirement in its own right — a student can have all 30 credits and still not graduate without it. It is worth confirming early rather than discovering the gap in Grade 12.
Forty hours of community involvement
Students complete at least 40 hours of unpaid community involvement across their secondary years. Hours are logged and signed off by the school.
The common failure here is procrastination. A student who leaves it to Grade 12 is trying to find forty hours in a year already full of applications and final examinations. Starting in Grade 9 or 10 makes it trivial.
Transferring in from another curriculum
Students arriving from another province or country can often receive equivalency credits for prior study through a Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) review conducted by the receiving school. This can substantially shorten the path to graduation, and it is worth asking about explicitly rather than assuming previous study will be recognised automatically.
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