Don A. Klinger Professor

CONCERNS WITH ACADEMIC DISHONESTY have intensified with the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Now, students can enter essay questions into bot-technology, like ChatGPT, to generate text-based responses that can appear to be authentic student work. While these AI bots cannot generate novel or creative ideas, they can synthesize existing knowledge and organize it into logical arguments.

We are now entering what we would call the third epoch of academic integrity. The first relates to the period preceding digital technology, the second coincides with the gradual use of Information Communication Technology (ICT), and the current epoch includes advanced and responsive ICT including AI applications. In many respects, these AI applications have ushered in a new age of plagiarism and cheating (Xiao et al., 2022). So, what should educators do next?

Although statistics vary across provinces, Canadian schools in general were closed for a total of 51 weeks during the pandemic – placing the nation in the highest bracket globally for school closures (UNESCO, n.d.). Unsurprisingly, provincial policymakers across Canada continue to be concerned about the negative short- and long-term impacts of the disruptions created by these closures on students’ learning and have been focusing their attention on improving achievement in traditional content areas such as reading, writing, mathematics, and science. The dominant political and popular media discourse is that students have fallen behind and need to “catch up” in these foundational subject areas. Certainly, international research suggests that this concern is well-founded, and that students’ learning has been significantly disrupted during the pandemic.

The close coupling of content standards with standardized testing brought about by Margaret Thatcher’s U.K. government in the late 1980s ushered in a new form of school accountability that has become the dominant education reform model used by industrialized governments around the world (Volante, 2012). Student performance on large-scale assessment measures are intended to hold school administrators and teachers accountable while also providing the “data” to spur system and school-level improvements. Indeed, every single Canadian province and territory administers and reports achievement in relation to these external provincial measures and also participates in varying degrees in prominent international tests such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme in International Student Assessment (PISA)...

Recently, there has been an increase in the number and purposes of large-scale educational assessment programs in Canada. However, due to the provincial/territorial control of education throughout Canada (Note 1), it is not known to what extent the format and purposes of these assessment programs vary. Therefore, the central purpose of the present paper is to document the format and explicit purposes of the current large-scale assessment programs in each of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories. Using document analysis of publicly accessible policy documents, examination of Ministry websites, and telephone interviews with Ministry (Department) of Education officials, the explicit purposes for each assessment were identified. At the same time, the general characteristics of the assessments were obtained. The article begins with these general characteristics to provide a context in which to present and discuss the explicit purposes. This order was adopted given the controversy surrounding the purposes of large-scale assessments in the provinces and territories (Rogers & Klinger, 2007).