I have never viewed any punishment books from my high school but know that most if not all punishments were recorded. The vast majority of the punishments were one, two or perhaps three strokes. Four was less common and six less common still.
I have reason to believe that most canings were “of the best”. I think it would be very unlikely for any record to be made about the force of the strokes.
I suspect that if you opened a punishment book at random you would find few if any sixes recorded on the open page.
I suspect that if you opened a punishment book from my school at random you would find few if any sixes recorded on the open page.
The above assertion can be explored.
Assuming there are, say, 15 punishments recorded per page and 5% of all recorded punishments are six-of-the-best and these are randomly distributed (unlikely) there is a probability of 0.95^15 = 0.46 that a randomly chosen page will contain no recorded sixes. (Here ^ means “raised to the power of”.)
The numbers I have used in this calculation are guesses. The result does not really support my original assertion.