TDSB lottery
Published in University of Toronto, 2025
In 2022, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) changed the policy on admissions into high school specialized programs (policy P100). The main change was to replace exams and auditions with a mandated randomized selection (a.k.a. lottery). An advocacy to revert this change became one of my past time projects. Here are highlights of my work:
- Evaluation of changes to the Student Interest Programs Policy, March 2023
- state of specialized programs before 2022 and the discussion of the changes to the policy.
- Plagiarism and made-up citations in “Literature review on meritocracy”, June 2023, press release
- In May 2023, as a part of the implementation update, TDSB published (see Appendix B) a review of scholarly literature, discussiong, but mostly criticizing, the idea of merit in public education.
- It turns out that the scholarship was not great. As I have found, around 20% citations were fake and 55% of the text was plagiarized.
- Media coverage: Global News, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Fraser Institute
- Although the TDSB has never confirmed that ChatGPT (released in the fall of 2022) was used in preperation of this report, I have managed to replicate some of the fake citations using ChatGPT. If that’s correct, it would be the first publicly known case of use of ChatGPT to prepare an official government document.
- Impact on Waterloo math contests, September 2025 with Michael Danishevsky, press release
- We document a dramatic drop in the performance of TDSB students in University of Waterloo math contest. We discuss various plausible explanations. The only explanation consistent with the data is the impact of the lottery.
- Media coverage: Toronto Star