OSSLT study guide
OSSLT · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) is a provincial assessment created by the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO). It measures whether students are meeting the minimum standard for literacy across all subjects up to the end of Grade 9, and successfully completing it - or completing the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Course (OSSLC) - is a graduation requirement for the Ontario Secondary School Diploma. Students working toward an OSSD are expected to write the test for the first time in their second year of secondary school, and students who entered Grade 10 from out of province are included unless the principal grants a deferral. The test is written in person at school on a digital device, in two supervised sessions: Session A is designed to take about 65 minutes and Session B about 75 minutes. Topics on this exam: Reading and Writing. The OSSLT study guide has 2 sections and about 713 words.
01Reading: Evidence, Main Idea, and Inference
The OSSLT Reading passages are short and varied: news reports, real-life stories, opinion pieces, instructions, and graphics paired with text. You are tested on whether you can find information, follow ideas, and judge what the text actually supports. The core concepts are main idea , supporting detail , explicit versus implied information , inference , point of view , tone , and text features such as headings, captions, and labels. True but irrelevant.
371 words, about 2 min02Writing: Clear Sentences, Organization, and Conventions
The OSSLT Writing tasks ask you to choose the clearest version of a sentence, fix errors, combine ideas smoothly, and produce a short piece of writing on a given topic. The concepts you need are sentence completeness , agreement , verb tense , pronoun reference , punctuation (especially commas and apostrophes), word choice , transitions , paragraph unity , and audience and purpose . Fragments and run-ons. A group of words with no main clause is a fragment; two complete sentences joined by only a comma is a run-on.
342 words, about 2 min