KEY POINTS:
As should be the case, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement continues to be a work in progress. A panel of experts from across the education sector is to look at the qualification and recommend improvements. The standards review is welcome not only as a chance to address ongoing qualms but to fortify the NCEA as it competes against international examination options. A radical overhaul is not the ambition of the review and would not be appropriate, but the qualification needs to be made as good as it can be.
Criticism of the NCEA has reduced markedly since a shake-up 12 months ago that, finally, promised the consistency and certainty that are the hallmarks of the traditional examination system. New merit and excellence endorsements were introduced to address concerns that the NCEA failed to motivate the academically able to do more than the minimum needed to pass. Failure also became an option on results notices. Additionally, moderation was boosted in a bid to ensure that internal assessment grades were consistent. In sum, this was a major departure from the original framework, which envisaged pupils competing against an objective set of standards, not one another.
Not all problems of consistency have been eradicated. Figures released this year showed about a third of NCEA marking for internal assessment identified by official moderators last year did not meet national standards. There was also a suggestion that some low-decile schools were giving pupils higher-than-expected marks. Moves to address the marking problems have begun, with the amount of moderation trebled and the introduction of random sampling, as opposed to schools being able to select the work being policed. Other consistency issues remain, however.
The Qualifications Authority says the impetus for the new review, to be completed by 2010, is the need to align standards with the new school curriculum, which was well received when it was unveiled late last year. But the review will also grapple with specific criticisms, including the resitting of internal assessments and issues of credit parity. Currently, schools set their own resitting policies and there are varying approaches. Standardisation of the number of times that pupils can resit standards seems appropriate, if only because the present situation can make it difficult to get an accurate picture of the worth of a school's assessment.
The question of credit parity between assessment and unit standards is far more complex. The NCEA's one-size-fits-all philosophy has been criticised for erasing distinctions between "easy", often competency-based, credits and harder tests. Some pupils have undoubtedly taken advantage of this to choose an easy path. Removing that temptation, however, involves processes of comparison, differentiation and allotment that could quickly become fraught. This will be the review's most taxing task.
According to Bali Haque, of the Qualifications Authority, the review is "a rare opportunity to align the curriculum development process with the assessment development process". It will also be a chance to recognise how far that assessment development has come and the validity of much of the criticism. There is an air here of the wheel turning full circle. That may discomfort the education ideologues who drew up the NCEA, but it is the fruit of six years of practical application. The increasing emphasis on pupils competing against one another benefits everyone, not least employers, who want a clear record of individual achievement and failure. And the least likely to complain are the pupils themselves.
