Letters: Keep NCEA standards high

Common assessment activities should be retained and not "dumbed down" to try to make schools look better. Photo / 123 rf

Letters to the Editor

As a close observer when School Certificate was buried and NCEA was introduced, I saw NCEA become captured by the high decile schools so that results tables could be published to show how wonderful they were.

I observed candidates earning 300 or more credits in a single year. I then saw the increase in the number of candidates applying for special conditions in the exams because they had anxiety issues.

We have heard schools and candidates complaining that the exams were not fair because they had not practised those questions in class. Now schools and students are complaining that common assessment activities are too difficult for them to pass.

Is it because the teachers have been trying to teach to the tests or exams rather than teach their students the skills and learnings related to a subject?

These common assessment activities should be retained and not “dumbed down” to try to make the schools look better.

NCEA is really not a qualification that has much value anyway so at least make the common assessment activities a true indicator of the literacy and mathematical ability of their students.

Richard Cole, Waipu.

Treaty bill far from extinct

Some predict that David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill will very soon be extinct, and his hubris subdued.

While our Prime Minister stubbornly insists that the bill won’t proceed, the overwhelming number of submissions surely confirms that this issue can’t be so readily dismissed, nor its author’s confidence so easily shaken.

Common sense will eventually prevail and as a well-known cheese advert reminds us, “good things take time”.

Jim Young, Lower Hutt.

Fossil fuel funding

I’ve no doubt Rex Sellar (“BNZ stance is woke policy”, Feb 3) is not alone in his rejection of the BNZ’s stance on not supporting fossil fuel providers’ funding.

His “no one’s going to tell me what to do” attitude will resonate strongly with many, especially climate-change enablers and deniers.

Do they – and he – also therefore object to being “told” to drive on the left? Or does that have more immediate consequences, that they can all actually comprehend?

Clyde Scott, Birkenhead.

Reducing emissions

Nick Leggett, of Infrastructure New Zealand, in his article last week, poses the question “what kind of New Zealand do we want to leave our kids in 2050?”

Certainly, we want New Zealand to remain a wealthy country by increasing our economic performance, the growth so promoted by our PM. However, no mention is made of the effects on our country of climate change over the next 25 years.

Our Government, along with many others, is currently putting the need for growth ahead of the need to reduce our emissions. The next 25 years will see more frequent and more powerful storms, floods, droughts and wildfires. How do we plan to pay for the ongoing cost of this damage to our property and infrastructure, managed retreat, and buyouts?

Further, with our increasing emissions, how will we pay for the necessary carbon credits to meet our Paris Agreement obligations?

It would seem we will be leaving our kids in 2050 not only a country facing the perils of a warming world but also the need to fund huge costs.

Linda McGrogan, Taupō.

Dogs and daylight savings

A study of the effects of daylight-saving adjustments on 54 dogs found that they needed about a week to adjust. Who would have thought?

No doubt the Ministry for Regulation will pick up on this startling news and propose legislation to spread the one-hour daylight-saving adjustment over one week. This would require us to adjust our clocks by 8 and 4/7th minutes each day for seven days. Such a common-sense adjustment should bring great relief to all and sundry – especially to dogs and their owners.

David Hopkins, Remuera.