Diploma Exams, Meet the Farm Kid.  

Posted by Wyatt

So as some of you are probably not familiar with these test I thought I would enlighten you. They are standardized test put out by the provincial government to ensure that every one in the province is receiving the same quality education . Now as I prepared and wrote my  last of 7 of these test I got to thinking. How would these test be described if you had to tell someone who only nows about cattle, well here is what I have come up with. They are like EPDs they are a guide for perspective buyers (universities)  to judge every one equally just as they do in the cattle industry. They have several different test much like EPDs from Bio to English and social not forgetting math and chemistry as well as physics (what I just wrote.) These are all weighted 50% of our final grade taking out any bias a teacher might have added. Much like the vast averages used in EPDs. Know for the people who are not as familiar with EPDs  Simply put, EPDs are an estimate of how a particular bull's calf will perform in certain traits compared to another bull's, in that particular breed and when bred to similar females, before the mating ever occurs. The actual EPD is calculated using information submitted to the breed associations and provides a basic representation of the pedigree for that particular bull for a particular trait of interest. It is very important to realize that EPDs are not static, they will change over time as more and more progeny information is collected, which leads us to another term of interest: accuracy. Accuracy is just that, how accurate or reliable an EPD is. It is measured on a scale from 0 to 1, the higher the number, the greater the accuracy. Accuracies are important when assessing existing bull batteries that may have animals of varying ages and when looking at pedigree information. However, when actually making purchasing decisions, most of the pool of animals you will be selecting from will be relatively young, having produced no progeny, and therefore will have relatively low accuracies for their individual EPDs. This is where going back and looking at pedigree EPDs and accuracies for potential purchases becomes useful.     

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 and is filed under , . You can leave a response and follow any responses to this entry through the Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) .

1 comments

I remember those tests! Hope they went well. I also wanted to let you know my blog as moved to www.crystalcattle.com Check me out there!