Differential effects of global modifications to large‐scale high stakes examination programmes
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Driven largely by calls for accountability, the use of large‐scale testing is expanding in terms of the number and purposes of testing programmes. At the same time, financial constraints have resulted in attempts to reduce the lengths of such examinations. An examination of the 1994/1995 and 1995/1996 British Columbia Scholarship programme illustrates that differential and unanticipated differences can occur when such changes to the testing programme are made. The removal of a portion of the constructed‐response (CR) and written tasks (WT) items used to identify scholarship recipients resulted in differences in scholarship scores and the identification of scholarship recipients. Further, the differences were found to affect subgroups of students differentially. While there were no differences attributed to gender, higher difference rates were associated with course area (humanities vs. science) or examination session (January vs. June). The results illustrate the complex and contextual impact of changes to examination programmes and the potential consequences of such changes. Test developers and users must make more of an effort to examine the consequences of examination programmes and planned changes upon the students and others who may be affected by the results.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it