John Morris: Spin-doctoring and prizes won't fix fatally flawed NCEA

COMMENT

Education Minister Trevor Mallard and the Qualifications Authority have taken to spin-doctoring. As much is indicated by the furore over the reporting (or non-reporting) of National Certificate of Educational Achievement results, the defensive prepared comments of Kate Colbert (the NCEA implementation manager) and Mr Mallard's announcement of substantial financial rewards to the top scholars in the new level 4 Scholarship examination.

Such an approach may well be needed to ensure that the new NCEA qualifications attract some credibility. This is a system that to most people is unfathomable and frustrating, and seems to add up to nothing more than a pick 'n' mix smorgasbord of bits and pieces.

While it would be churlish to criticise Mr Mallard's offer of financial rewards to our top scholars, the overall feeling is that of a bureaucracy making policy on the hoof.

Normally, students study for qualifications because they are meaningful, recognised, valid and transportable - not because the Government offers big-money scholarships. It is an unusual way of trying to encourage students to bother sitting the new level 4 NCEA Scholarship exam, which still has a long way to go to gain international acceptance.

It is also an interesting decision in another way. The NCEA is a standards-based assessment system: by definition there are no marks and no rankings. It is a non-competitive exam because the whole idea of the NCEA and standards-based assessment is that individual students compete only with themselves. When individuals have achieved competency, they get the appropriate credits.

Philosophically, the idea of having a top student therefore goes directly against the NCEA philosophy. In addition, how are the top students in this Scholarship exam to be selected when there are no marks to discriminate the best from the rest?

What we are seeing, therefore, after only two years of NCEA operation, is a compromising of the initial philosophical underpinnings of the system. This is not surprising because the NCEA has neither cohesion nor rigour and will undoubtedly lead our country's students further down the path of illiteracy and innumeracy.

To those in the education sector who genuinely care about such things as excellence, challenge and international credibility, and who researched not only the methodology of standards-based assessment but looked overseas at examples of such assessment systems in practice, such outcomes were predictable.

Unfortunately, the Ministry of Education bureaucrats, who survive by dreaming up or transplanting fads to unleash on other people's children, apparently did not bother to do either. If they did, they ignored the mass of research that is scathing of standards-based assessment as a methodology, particularly for assessing conventional academic subjects.

What is really frustrating is that personal overtures to the minister and Qualifications Authority and ministry personnel expressing concerns and proposing possible solutions led only to pillorying as right-wing extremists and backward-looking traditionalists.

In fact, those delivering the warnings were away ahead of the ministry and the authority. They had done their homework and were concerned for the future of education. They were not trying to feather their own nests but seeking to keep our education system competitive internationally rather than allowing it to slide down the OECD ladder.

Any qualification that allows students to accumulate and amalgamate credits from the study of academic subjects, leisure activities and vocational pursuits into one single overarching qualification will struggle to gain international or even national credibility.

There is nothing wrong with leisure pursuits and vocational subjects leading to qualifications. The issue is that it is simply not possible to create a parity of esteem between credits gained for subjects such as physics and history with credits gained for subjects such things as picking up litter, learning how to play casino card games or tractor-driving.

This parity of esteem is further compromised when there is neither consistency nor comparability between the assessment of subjects. There also is no national standard. Standards differ from school to school, a problem which is exacerbated because of the right to unlimited reassessment that is an integral part of the NCEA qualification.

While some schools allow multiple resits of achievement standards, others allow none. This, with some schools not reporting their students' failures to the authority, adds to the inconsistency and lack of comparability that are part and parcel of this qualification.

The NCEA is undoubtedly well-intentioned in that it aims to give those who in the past gained no qualifications a chance of gaining some qualification before leaving school. The problem is that the qualification will largely be an illusion because it will have limited credibility and meaning.

It is also a well-proven fact that what these less able students need is a more traditional education. A greater emphasis on literacy, numeracy and a structured approach to education has proved overseas to be the best way to improve academic performance.

It is unfortunate that Mr Mallard seems unable or unwilling to look beyond the pedagogical correctness of the progressive school of education, and instead research what really works with children.

* John Morris is the headmaster of Auckland Grammar School.