Authority claims NCEA exams in perfect order

Karen Sewell

NCEA is in perfect working order despite having to stop and re-mark thousands of English exams because not enough students were passing, says the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.

Acting chief executive Karen Sewell conceded that the narrow marking schedule for the level one English segment Comprehension of an Unfamiliar Text meant "some students who should have achieved this standard were just missing out".

The schedule was corrected and thousands of papers were re-marked.

Marking for level two English comprehension and the level one English segment An Essay about a Novel was also found to be inappropriate and had to be adjusted.

But Ms Sewell said that picking up these discrepancies showed not another NCEA controversy, but that the system was working.

"[The problem] wasn't that the exam was too hard. The expected proportion of students that got Merit and Excellent standards was fine, and so was the exam.

"The marking schedule wasn't quite right in one part ... and it is now."

National Party education spokesman Bill English said the "massaging" of results raised serious quality issues.

"The simple fact is that this 'scaling by another name' wasn't supposed to be happening in a standards-based model.

"I'm suspicious that [Education Minister Steve] Maharey has told NZQA to massage the results to make sure there is no repeat of the controversy which dogged last year's exams."

Mr Maharey distanced the re-marking from the NCEA debacle over last year's scholarship exams, in which results varied wildly across subjects. In the aftermath, the authority's former chief executive, Karen van Rooyen, and its council chairman, Graeme Fraser, resigned.

"The intention was very close monitoring of marking this year and, where anomalies were picked up, we would go as far as re-marking the whole exam if necessary."

He said the system was not massaging results, but ensuring fair marking without shifting the standard levels, the pitfall of scaling.

"This is how the system was designed to work, it's working, and people can be reassured that it's working because they can see it."

Secondary Principal's Association president Graham Young said the problems picked up this year would be difficult to identify before students sat exams.

"The only way to pick it up before would be to have a dummy run of the exam paper somewhere, and the chances of breaching confidentiality would be pretty high."

- Additional reporting NZPA