Dialogue: Certificate will raise profiles of students

The new qualifications system for senior secondary pupils will tell the full story of their achievements, writes BILL LENNOX*.

Lydia Austin, in a recent Dialogue page column, criticised the national qualifications system that is to be introduced for senior school students from 2002.

Much of her comment on the National Certificate of Educational Achievement and the Qualifications Authority was, however, inaccurate and lacked rigour and balance.

First, the National Certificate and its constituent achievement standards are not the authority's latest initiative. The policy was established by Cabinet in 1997 and is being developed by the Ministry of Education. The authority will administer the system.

Lydia Austin cast doubts on the authority as "a fair and credible examiner," quoting a single debate of five years ago. This is hardly convincing evidence compared with the hundreds of national school and tertiary exams (and other operations) the authority has run over the past 10 years, to the satisfaction of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders.

Errors and omissions are rare, acknowledged and put right. The authority is looked to by examination bodies throughout the world as a leader in the field.

Lydia Austin also wrote of the authority's "continued refusal to allow senior university staff to check school exit exams." Yet almost every Bursaries exam is set or moderated by a university academic.

In commenting upon the National Certificate, she wondered what "the universities will require under the new system" but apparently did not bother to find out.

The authority is already working on a university entrance provision for the National Certificate environment. The university representatives with whom we are working are taking a refreshingly balanced approach to change and understand the National Certificate in some detail.

They consider the statutory university entrance provision can be established from National Certificate credits alone. Credit, merit and excellence grades from achievement standards can generate selection scores to discriminate between students applying for particular tertiary programmes.

The strengths of a standards-based assessment system seemed not to be understood by Lydia Austin. She said it was "difficult to comprehend what the student is supposed to have achieved," yet that is exactly what standards-based assessment delivers.

The single result that a student gets for a School Certificate, Sixth Form Certificate or University Bursaries subject tells them little about their actual achievements. Percentage marks and grades give some idea of overall ranking in a subject but actually conceal details of achievement.

Results from a standards-based system like the National Certificate create a profile of a student's strengths and weaknesses, just as school reports have been attempting to do for about 20 years.

But the National Certificate profile will reflect national standards in a way that school reports cannot. In English, for example, National Certificate results can show that a student is excellent at speaking and research, very good at creative writing, just satisfactory at formal writing and poor at reading and understanding literature.

The problem with current grades and percentages is that they are coarse and cumbersome. It is almost impossible to unpack them.

With smaller units of information, users can package and aggregate results to suit their own purposes. National Certificate results will be detailed, simple to understand and easily combined. Parents, employers and tertiary providers will be able to compare students with each other on the basis of real and valid information.

Details of a scholarship award within the National Certificate framework are yet to be decided, but there will be assessment of the "higher-level thinking skill of integrating knowledge from different areas" that Lydia Austin is concerned about. And it will be done more effectively than can be managed within Bursaries exams.

The concept of "rarity value" in qualifications is interesting and too rarely discussed. Some believe that an A grade (in anything) carries value and prestige only if there is a limited number of A grades handed out.

It depends what we read into A grade. Does it mean "in the top group" or does it mean "achieves a very high standard"? These are not necessarily the same thing.

An Olympic gold medal can be won with a relatively mediocre performance. Given the competition on the day, the winner gets a gold medal regardless of the time they record. In the wine industry, on the other hand, gold medals are awarded on the basis of standards. If lots of gold medals are awarded, the overall standard of wine is deemed to be high and we applaud that. If there are few gold medals, we worry about the state of the industry.

In national school qualifications, we have traditionally awarded a limited number of high grades based on rankings. The community expects a similar proportion of candidates every year to get high grades. But there is little certainty about the actual standard of achievement gained by those who get marks in the 90s, for example.

A more effective way of attaching prestige to very high grades (and rarity value if that is required) is to ensure that only those who reach high standards get high grades. That is exactly what the National Certificate will do. Any student who achieves excellence in all of the achievement standards in any subject (let alone across a number of subjects) will be a very high achiever indeed. That will be a more rigorous challenge than any confronting this year's School Certificate or Bursaries candidates.

* Bill Lennox is the Qualifications Authority communications manager.