TORONTO -- A former marker of Ontario's mandatory, high-stakes Grade 10 literacy test is "blowing the whistle" on a scoring process he describes as confusing, unfair and fundamentally flawed. Carlo Ricci, who teaches English at Nipissing University in North Bay, spent a week in 2002 as a marker for Ontario's Education Quality and Accountability Office, which administers the test.
It was a week fraught with confusion, tension and frustration, Ricci writes in an article to appear this month in Our Schools, Our Selves, a quarterly journal published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Standards were changed on the fly and markers and EQAO supervisors clashed frequently over opposing views of whether the answers to certain test questions should be deemed correct, he said.
"We had to get a EQAO supervisory officer to come into our room to try to calm people down because they were so upset at the fact this is nonsense," Ricci said in an interview.
"When our group leader would come around, she would mark and there were disagreements all the time . . . There was clearly a lot of frustration and tension in the room."
Of all the many provincewide tests introduced by the former Conservative government since 1995, the high-stakes literacy test has stirred the most controversy because students must pass it to graduate.
A group of parents has already threatened to sue the province if it doesn't abolish the test, which it considers an unfair evaluation for students with special needs or in the less advanced "applied" stream.
Marguerite Jackson, the EQAO's chief executive, said in an interview Friday that Ricci's experience is not an indication of widespread problems with the test or the marking process.
"It is a reflection of one individual's experience, and that experience is a very small part of the whole process," Jackson said.
"Therefore it is not reflective of the marking process that we use."
That process, she said, occurs in three stages.
The first involves a team of professional educators who devise an answer key and identify samples of student writing to illustrate what makes the grade.
The second stage, the one in which Ricci participated, is the analytic marking stage, which involves only those students who narrowly passed or failed the test, Jackson said.
"In the analytic marking, what we're looking for is information that we can give back to the student that both the student and the teacher will have to know what they need to do to meet the standard we're looking for."
Students who fail the test have an opportunity to write it again the next year. If they fail a second time, they can take a remedial literacy course in the latter half of their Grade 12 year.
David Baker, the lawyer representing the parents, said he's heard from a number of former test markers who echo Ricci's claims.
"What they do discuss . . . is the chaotic nature of the marking process, the highly subjective nature of the marking process and the real concerns they have about the validity of the test."
In his article, Ricci describes how he and several fellow markers grew increasingly frustrated with the test's subjectivity and with guidelines and marking templates that seemed to be constantly changing.
Often, he said, supervisors would instruct markers to tear out sections from their guidebooks -- sections the markers had been using as guides the day before.
"They'd say, go to your binders, turn to this page; that exemplar we've discovered is flawed, so take that page to the shredder and throw it out," Ricci said. "People were saying, 'This is the basis that I was using to mark all along, and now you're asking me to throw it out.' People were upset about that."
