Editorial: What's not being said on NCEA

Some of the most pressing problems of government go largely undebated in election campaigns. The reason is fairly obvious; they are in the too-hard baskets of all parties. One such problem is the new school examination system, the NCEA. Its difficulties go deeper than the perverse scholarship results it threw up last summer. It is a system that some say is flawed in its conception as well as practice. But both major parties are trying to make the best of it. Both have been involved in its long gestation and both are willing to try to make it work.

When the subject was put to spokesmen of several parties by a Herald panel last week, Education Minister Trevor Mallard, National's Bill English and Brian Donnelly of New Zealand First all saw a need to simplify the procedures and reduce the workload. Mr Mallard talked of allowing students to skip the level 1 and 2 exams, allowing them to concentrate on level 3, the school-leaving qualification for most. It sounds like a simplification of the system but might not be.

Mr Mallard would retain level 1 and 2 exams for those who might leave school without reaching level 3, so teachers would still need to set those tests and teach to them even if most students were not sitting them. And what would be done in the meantime with those students who were setting their sights on the third level leaving certificate? Some sort of assessment system would be needed to monitor their progress every year. Might it not be easier to use the NCEA each step of the way?

If the better students are taken out of the NCEA in the first two years, the level 1 and 2 exams will become harder to mark properly. In theory that should not be so; the founding theory of NCEA was that the range of abilities of those taking an exam has no bearing on an individual's performance. The person was to be assessed against an objective standard, not the abilities of others. But as so often with theories, it has to be modified in practice. How, for example, can a reliable objective standard be set except by reference to the standard actually reached by most students at that stage of education? In practice "standards-based assessment" has involved teachers in a great deal of external checking and comparison of tests and results. So much so that Mr Donnelly says: "We are actually assessing more than we were in the previous system. We've probably got the most overly externally assessed system in the world."

The survival of external procedures is music to the ears of those who never saw anything wrong with national exams and worried from the outset that internal assessment would mean that the value of students' exam results would depend on the reputation of the school awarding them. But the mixture of external and internal methods used by NCEA is probably far more complicated and time-consuming for teachers and schools than national examinations used to be. The likelihood is that the system will drift back to straightforward external exams for the pupils that want to take them, and different options for those preferring to acquire a technical skill.

The minister would like to see students having the choice of starting an apprenticeship in their final years of school, perhaps attending a polytech or even working for part of the week. That, too, is a long away from the original intention of the exam reformers, which was to remove the distinction between academic and technical education and break down all subjects into a set of skills that could be acquired at each level of the system. As the impracticalities become apparent we seem to be gravitating back to the system we had. But no party wants to say so.