Government had been warned of scholarship failings

The organisation which successfully administered scholarship exams for 12 years warned the Education Ministry it could not accept proposed changes to the exams under NCEA, National MP Bill English has revealed.

The New Zealand Education and Scholarship Trust (NZEST) warned Education Secretary Howard Fancy in early 2003 it could not accept several changes which would bring the exams under the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) umbrella.

They included:

* The prescriptive nature of standard-based assessment methodology for assessing scholarship papers.

* Setting scholarship exams for up to 40 subjects taught at year 13 (seventh form) level.

* The method for reporting scholarship standards to students.

* The trust said in a letter, released by Mr English, that students should receive detailed feedback about their performance, including marks, grades, ranking, medians and entitlement for awards.

"Simply categorising students into 'not achieved scholarship', 'achieved scholarship' and 'scholarship with distinction' does not give genuine feedback to students who have made the commitment to test themselves at the highest level," the letter said.

"These three key issues for NZEST trust and other, perhaps less significant matters, appeared to receive little recognition from the scholarship reference group.

"While NZEST acknowledges that New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the ministry must make the final arbitration, I trust they cannot expect NZEST to agree to a position it cannot accept."

In a November 2002 letter to the ministry's curriculum manager, Rawiri Gibson, NZEST asked that it be noted that resolutions from a scholarship reference group meeting "should not be regarded as being unanimously supported".

"NZEST further believes that there is little point in attending future meetings of the reference group as our view of a high-quality, competitive, external scholarship examination has been rejected by both the Ministry of Education and the NZQA.

"We do not support the proposed model of NCEA scholarship in its current form ... ," the letter said.

Mr English said the letters showed the Government had chosen to ignore repeated early warnings from leading educators about scholarship exams.

"When leading educators, with years of experience with scholarship, told Labour they were on the wrong track, they should have taken notice," he said in a statement.

"Now thousands of students are paying the price for their arrogance."

Former public servant Doug Martin is leading a State Services Commission review of the scholarship exams and of NZQA's performance.

The review was announced after it was revealed exam results varied widely between subjects and there were fewer scholarships than expected.

- NZPA