KEY POINTS:
Education Minister Steve Maharey is considering an overhaul of the NCEA after admitting it can fail to motivate students to work hard.
He is proposing modifications this year that would reward top-performing students with more credits and could make difficult subjects worth more credits than easier ones.
As increasing numbers of schools look to other qualifications, Mr Maharey has acknowledged the National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA) often fails to recognise hard work.
He said he was expecting a report from the Qualifications Authority in a few days to provide solutions, which would improve the fairness of the system.
His comments follow a week in which major schools, including Avondale College, Kelston Boys' High School and St Cuthbert's College, decided to consider alternatives such as the Cambridge International Examinations.
Mr Maharey promised changes by the end of the year.
"The whole point of this is for students to be assessed in a way they think is fair. It is fairer than the old School Certificate system and I don't think schools want to return to that. But it's not as fair as it could be at the moment and that has been reflected in comments," Mr Maharey said.
He agreed with critics who said it did not properly recognise hard work and left some students feeling they had not been rewarded for the effort put in.
He was yet to see what solutions NZQA would present, but he said it could look at giving harder subjects more weighting which took into account their level of difficulty.
His comments follow repeated criticisms that students were "cherry picking" the easy subjects to get credits, rather than taking more difficult options.
He said some students chose subjects for personal interest or future university plans, as they did under any system.
"But if we are seeing people making choices that were bad for their education because they thought one was harder and more time consuming than another, then that is a design feature we would want to have out of the system."
He discounted plans to return to the narrow form of grading students from A to F, saying it would make the system too complex. However, it was possible students could get more credits for passing with "excellence" or "merit", rather than a bare "achieved".
Currently, as long as students pass, they receive the same number of credits regardless.
He said concerns that NCEA did not motivate students to strive were valid.
Mr Maharey's comments were welcomed conditionally by two principals who have criticised NCEA.
Auckland Grammar headmaster John Morris said last night: "It's good they're looking at making some significant changes, because in the past they've just tinkered around the edges."
However allocating different credits to different subjects, depending on difficulty, could be tricky.
"How do you identify hard subjects? Obviously level one physics is harder than level one picking up rubbish, but it's harder to say whether history is harder than geography, say."
Avondale College principal Brent Lewis, who cited lack of confidence in NCEA as driving him to consider Cambridge, said major changes would need to be carried out carefully.
"To his [Mr Maharey's] credit, he is acknowledging the issues and exploring ways of resolving the problems."
However, both principals were dismayed at Mr Maharey's refusal to further boost NZQA monitoring to ensure internal assessment grades in schools were consistent.
Mr Maharey has also supported a return to indicating when a student had failed a paper on the student's record, saying it should be noted when a student had a fair go but did not pass a paper.
He expected the paper to also review whether internal assessment and unit standards were being used in appropriate areas - news welcomed by Mr Morris, who said unit standards were too often offered for academic subjects and in literacy and numeracy, rather than in vocational areas.
Maharey plan
* Education Minister Steve Maharey is considering:
* Giving students more NCEA credits for high pass marks
* Making harder subjects worth more credits than easier ones
