English warns of spreading NCEA problems

Problems with secondary school qualifications look to have spread from scholarship to NCEA levels two and three, says the National Party.

Education spokesman Bill English yesterday warned that thousands more students could be affected by the continuing troubles in the NCEA system.

He said schools received their NCEA results at the end of last week and he was hearing disturbing reports of anomalies affecting "large numbers" of students.

The report of further problems comes days after the Government stepped in to give replacement awards to scholarship students after an unacceptably high failure rate in the exams.

The Government and Associate Education Minister David Benson-Pope have come under attack for what has been labelled the scholarship debacle.

Mr English said schools were reporting big variations in pass rates between internal assessment and external exams in NCEA levels two and three.

Students who took subjects with large internal assessment components had an unfair advantage over students sitting exam-based subjects, he said.

"I understand that in one subject 80 per cent of students passed internal assessments but just 38 per cent passed the external exam."

Last week the Herald reported top graphics students at Rangitoto College in Auckland had failed to pass NCEA level three.

The students had achieved "excellence" grades at levels one and two, and had passed level three internal moderation to the same standard, but failed the external marking.

Rangitoto College principal Allan Peachey said the external marking was "a travesty of justice and grossly unfair".

"There needs to be an open investigation into who is leading the exam process because this is clearly incompetence."

Mr English said one school had calculated it was twice as hard for students to pass an external exam as internal assessment. Schools were still collating results and more would be known this week.

He was concerned, if the trend continued, that students would go for subjects with more internal assessment so they could get the credits they needed.

"A shift away from externally assessed standards will compound the trend away from science subjects to subjects that are regarded as soft options because they are internally assessed."