Impact of KPU's Zero Textbook Cost program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) developed and launched Canada’s first Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) programs in January 2018. This project seeks to investigate the impact of this growing initiative on educational outcomes including course enrolment, persistence, and performance through an analysis of KPU’s institutional undergraduate course-level data (which integrates the ZTC course attribute) from January 2018 through to August 2022 (14 semesters). It is hypothesized that ZTC courses will have higher rates of enrolment and persistence and superior mean course performance than non-ZTC courses.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.036 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".