KEY POINTS:
Dramatic changes could be on the way for NCEA - on Tuesday, Steve Maharey, the Minister of Education, will reveal plans to overhaul the way the qualification is designed.
Experts who have been flown to Wellington over the last few months to talk through the changes have been sworn to secrecy.
But the Herald on Sunday understands Cabinet will announce a number of immediate changes this week, as well as a list of long-term issues to work on.
All of the points below were "on the agenda" in the long term, some of those consulted have confirmed.
Recommendations put forward in a report by NZQA and the Ministry of Education, published late last year, included:
* Scrapping the first two levels of NCEA, turning the three years into a "grab-bag" of standards that students could take three years to collect;
* Updating unit standards, which students currently either passed or failed, so students could pass with achieved, merit, or excellence grades;
* Letting schools test students themselves, rather than putting them through national exams.
Other hints came during parliamentary question time in March, when Maharey highlighted a number of problem areas that were under review:
* The rise in internal assessment (although parliament wanted only 50 per cent of credits to be handed out by schools, this figure had soared to 69.4 per cent last year). Maharey said this "slight increase" was "being looked at" by NZQA;
* Clarity of results; Maharey said a proposal to change certificates to give "a clearer idea of what the student has gained relative to other students" was part of the review;
* Recording of failure; two years ago, the Government agreed that grades of 'not achieved' should appear on student records. Prime Minister Helen Clark said last September that she was "somewhat at a loss" as to why this hadn't already happened - Maharey said it was "under consideration as part of the design changes".
One turnaround is already public.
The Herald on Sunday revealed two weeks ago that NZQA planned to make random sampling of teachers' marking a permanent feature of NCEA.
This was a complete departure from the current system, where teachers chose which marking they wanted to hand in for checking.
On Friday, a spokeswoman for Maharey said the announcement about "refining" the NCEA system would be made on Tuesday.
