Effectiveness?  Don’t know how effective they are, when the students who are being tested, do not derived any benefit from the results. It does becomes really questionable, as to who truly benefits when the results of the data, the students behind the testing group, now become the test rats for the new policies and practices that resulted from the interpretation of the scores of older students.

Crazy eh? Its like the medical scientists running diagnostic testing on cancer patients, and then using the results to treat other cancer patients based on the diagnostic testing of someone else’s tests.

Add to the craziness, in Ontario it is shown that the EQAO tests less and within fewer defined criteria. It results in more students passing that unfortunately includes most of the children with weaker skills in reading, writing and numeracy. A mild to moderate dyslexic children without remediation, would be able to pass. It results in children who should be receiving increased academic support never receiving the support and unlikely to be identified as having potential learning difficulties.

Crazy eh? But it get worse, in the senior years of high school. Welcome to the world, where a grade 12 English student, is expected to write an essay at a third year university level of understanding, without the basic knowledge framework of truly understanding the how-tos on literary analysis and critique much less understand the content of the English novel and its characters. It too results in students of what they called, and has been called since my day, bull shi_ _ting your way through it and hope for the best. If all else fails, cheat because in the long term, its a complete waste of everybody’s time, because no student is learning, except they know one thing for certain, they hate English. None of them are contemplating becoming English majors…...........