William J. Reese, Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a high school student in the late 1950s, I (and thousands of others) experienced the Ontario Grade 13 "Departmental Exams" -standardized exams which were sent out in sealed envelopes to high schools across the province, to be written at the same time everywhere (e.g.English Literature -Monday, June 9 th , 9:00am, etc.).Our names were coded on our answer sheets, and they were sent to Toronto to be marked anonymously by teachers hired for the summer.Later in the summer we would receive in the mail a print-out of our results -and soon afterwards, a brochure would appear in the mailbox from our local Board of Education (a large suburb of Toronto), ranking all the schools in the district according to the percentage of exams passed.(For whatever reasons, individual students, classes or teachers were not identified in these brochures).University enrolment was based almost entirely on the results of these "Departmentals."To this day, two specific memories stand out for me, in addition to the "nervousness and fright" (see below) that many of us suffered.First, some months before the end of term, on our sciences and maths teachers' instructions (five courses and five final exams), money would be collected from students and class sets of "Coles Reprints" purchased.These reprints were collections of all of the Departmental Exams from the previous twenty-five years.Then, for much of the rest of the year, each day's classes would consist of going over, in detail, all of the questions from one year's exam.My other memory pertains to the experience which a classmate suffered that year.Our French teacher had decided that he would probably not be successful in his exam at year's end and, clearly in collusion with school officials, he was told part way through the year that he should wait until the following year to take the course and that he was going to be removed from the class in the meantime (in effect, extending his
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".