Dialogue: Shades of 19th century in using overseas exams

By LYDIA AUSTIN*

Auckland Grammar School's decision to offer its students the opportunity and challenge of sitting Cambridge University A level exams comes as no surprise.

It brings to centre-stage some of the problems inherent in the qualifications framework and particularly the Qualification Authority's planned replacement of Bursary, Sixth-Form Certificate and School Certificate with achievement standards from 2002.

Public school exams, for all their faults and difficulties, are useful. They maintain a uniform standard and provide a measure of quality control and a means of selecting students for further education and the job market.

To serve these functions, an exit qualification must be accepted by employers and the public as credible. In an increasingly global economy it also needs to be recognised in other countries and needs to be seen to consistent and fair. Some qualifications must also have a rarity value to distinguish the most academically able from the rest.

Why is it, then, that the authority's latest qualification initiative is being rejected by one of our top schools, and many others may follow suit?

The authority confuses the need to provide some recognition of the learning achieved by every student with the need to provide almost the same recognition for every student. Although students will be awarded achievement standards at three different levels depending on performance, there are minimal differences between the levels.

Moreover, there is the fundamental problem inherent in a fragmented assessment system such as the proposed achievement standards, that the higher-level thinking skill of integrating knowledge from different areas is virtually impossible to assess.

In such a regime, the low-level thinking skills of the less-able student cannot readily be distinguished from the higher levels of the more able. If all students are to be encouraged to reach their potential, there needs to be a substantial challenge for high-fliers.

Auckland Grammar's headmaster, John Morris, clearly believes that this will not happen for his best students under the new system of achievement standards.

To be accepted by the public, a qualification also needs to be seen as credible and fair. The debacle over the 1995 School Certificate general science exam did little to support the authority as a fair and credible examiner.

That a public exam could be set and graded by people who clearly had less knowledge of the subject than some of the students, was nothing short of outrageous. Each year there are similar complaints about the annual national examinations.

The authority's continued refusal to allow senior university staff to check these school exit exams for freedom from fundamental errors further lessens its credibility. The proliferation of assessment units does nothing to diminish these concerns.

Internal assessment is another area which raises concerns about uniformity of standards and hence credibility. If the authority is incapable of reliably ensuring a few School Certificate and Bursary exams are reasonable and free from errors, what chance is there of ensuring the reliability of hundreds of achievement standards, let alone the hundreds more that will be internally assessed?

One much-heralded solution to the perceived problem of too few students achieving formal recognition of any academic achievements after many years in school has been the introduction of unit standards. These credits for small chunks of work not only give teachers much extra work in assessing and reassessing, but have not gained the universal approval of schools, employers or parents.

Unit standards provide little challenge for the more able students, who are supposed to be stimulated to greater effort by trying to attain a greater number of standards. Since they are achievable by almost anyone, any individual standard has no rarity value.

Neither is there any rarity value in any of the new achievement standards. These, too, are designed to be achievable by all students who apply themselves with a modicum of diligence.

Many think that the challenge provided by the Bursary exam itself has declined. For the able student who is university bound, the only qualification of any value is that which will allow entry - Bursary or some equivalent public exam. What the universities will require under the new system remains to be seen.

When it comes to international recognition, or even recognition here, unit standards or achievement standards have a long way to go. One of the difficulties is that with the large number of individual units, it is difficult to comprehend what the student is supposed to have achieved.

Employers and higher-education establishments are likely to look for key standards, and the effort to catalogue all the other fragments of learning will be largely ignored.

Any new qualification takes time to be recognised and accepted, and if its advantages are not immediately obvious, as with the latest achievement standards, that process may never be completed.

Over the years New Zealand has struggled to develop a national system of academic qualifications which is uniform, fair, publicly accepted and of an internationally recognised standard.

When this country was establishing the University of New Zealand in the mid-19th century, a major concern was to maintain standards of achievement comparable with that of London University.

New Zealand professors were not trusted to mark final examinations for the bachelors degrees and each year the papers were sent to England to be marked.

It took many years before New Zealand developed enough confidence in its own system to allow its professors to decide if a student had reached a sufficient standard to qualify for a university degree. Are we to return to a system where local qualifications have little value compared with those of the "home" country?

By giving his students the opportunity to measure their performance against standards set in Britain, Auckland Grammar is retreating to the position of our education system in the 19th century.

This represents a serious setback for our development as a nation and should alert the Qualifications Authority to reconsider the whole issue of national assessment, particularly for more able students.

* Dr Lydia Austin is a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland's school of education.