The Boston examiners tried to offer some encouragement by pointing to the achievement of the best schools and exhorting the others to copy their practices. They recommended specific changes in instructional methods and school organization. They published a table giving the ranks of the schools in order of achievement, saying at the same time that the rankings were only approximate as measures of intellectual accomplishment and far from adequate as measures of the merit of a school (Caldwell & Courtis, 1925, pp. 180-181). Nonetheless, the ranking of schools by achievement test scores had begun.