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How’s that again?
Ontario's testing body, the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), has just released the province-wide results of its grade 10 literacy test. As the graph shows, only 83% of the province's grade 10 "fully-participating" students passed the test (the unfully-participating students include students who have dropped out of school, students who are ineligible to write the test because they are, for example, disabled in some way or are not fluent in one of the province's official languages, and students who were absent on one or more of the test days: if the unfully-participating students were taken into consideration the pass rate would be much lower - perhaps in the neighbourhood of 60%). And the test is easy (see this sample test booklet).
Anyway, that's not the main point that I wish to make. In the EQAO's press release, they state "of the 143,246 students who actually wrote the test, 83% were successful, thus maintaining the high rate of success seen over the past five years". Then they say, "there has been a one-percentage-point decrease in each of the last two years."
Exactly how does a two-percentage-point decrease over two years represent the maintenance of the rate of success? After all, we're talking approximately 3,000 students here. The EQAO's remarkable pronouncement reminds me of the concept of doublethink as coined by George Orwell in his book 1984 - the ability to accept two mutually-contradictory concepts in your mind at the same time. And this from a supposedly-neutral arms-length testing organization!