A full description and discussion of the method used in the Secondary Schools Report Card for British Columbia is provided in Appendix 1. Below is a brief explanation of the indicators and the overall rating. In each case there is a value for the indicator, for example, the exam mark, and the FI rating, which is a comparative ranking on a one to 10 scale. The FI rating makes it possible to compare the results from year to year.
The teaching indicators
Average exam mark
Good teachers get the best out of each of their students. They can help all students—from the bottom of the class to the top—to reach their potential. In order to see how all the students of a particular school are doing, we can look at the average mark that students at that school receive on their provincial exams.
These uniform provincial exams are especially good for comparison purposes because, no matter what school the student attends anywhere in the province, the content of the exam is the same. Also, as these grade 12 courses require students to have successfully completed courses in the early grades, they not only indicate the teaching quality at the grade 12 level, but also that at the earlier grade levels as well.
Fail rate
A very important responsibility of teachers is to ensure that all their students are able to pass the course, and the total number of these exams written. We divided the first by the number of provincial exams written which received a failing grade, to get the percentage of all exams which were failed. We called this the Fail Rate.
Exam mark versus school mark
An important part of good teaching is accurate feedback. If a student has consistently achieved at, say, the 75 percent level throughout the year, she should reasonably be able to expect that—by investing roughly the same effort—she'll receive roughly the same mark on the exam.
To assess the accuracy of feedback at each school, we compared the average exam mark (see above) with the average school mark—the total of all the results from tests, essays, quizzes, etc. given in class—for all the provincially examinable courses offered at the school. This indicator (Exam Mark vs. School Mark) records the average size of the absolute difference between the exam mark and the school mark for all the provincial exams written at the school.
The counselling indicators
Grad rate
This indicator compares the number of “potential” graduates enrolled in the school on September 30 with the number of students who actually graduate by the end of the same school year.
How many students stick it out, put in the effort to pass their courses, and actually graduate with their class? An effective counselling effort will help boost this number.
Participation Rate
The provincially examinable courses are, for the most part, of value to every student, regardless of his or her post-secondary plans. They develop or enhance skills which are useful in a wide range of future activities. These are the courses most likely to be accepted as pre-requisites to further training at colleges, technical institutes, and universities. A high rate of participation in provincially examinable courses indicates a school's success in helping students get the most out of high school while, at the same time, keeping their post-secondary options open.
The participation rate is the average number of provincial exams written by each student in the school. First, the number of students (see Note 3) who wrote a provincial exam in each of the courses is determined and the total for all the courses is calculated. This total is then divided by the grade 12 enrollment.
The FI index values
For each school, for each indicator we calculated an FI index (Fraser Institute Index) value from the raw score. To do this, we compared each raw score to corresponding results in the base year (1992/93). The base year raw scores for each indicator were sorted from highest to lowest and then divided into 10 equal groups. The range of scores in the group that contained the highest scores was assigned an FI index value of 10; the next range of scores was assigned an FI index value of 9; and so on, until the lowest range of scores was assigned an FI index value of one. For each indicator, we simply looked at the range into which the indicator value fell and assigned it the appropriate FI index value.
The overall school rating
While each of the indicators is important, it is very often the case that a particular school does better on some indicators than on others. So, just like a teacher must make a decision about a student's overall performance, we need an overall indicator of school performance. As teachers do, we have combined all the indicators to produce an overall School FI index value.
Other notes