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Researchers from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority are investigating a controversial "scale-based approach" to marking after finding fundamental problems with the NCEA system.
Katherine Rich, National's education spokeswoman, said the "disgraceful admission" raised questions over the results of the 476,713 students who had sat NCEA exams.
The problems - and proposed solution - have sparked debate in the sector over whether NZQA is swinging back to the pre-NCEA system.
The new method will be trialled in a pilot scheme this year, but NZQA emphatically denied it was scaling - the system used to mark the old School Certificate and Bursary.
But some who viewed the documents last week disagreed, saying NZQA was veering away from standards-based assessment, and back towards the old system that was dumped in favour of NCEA.
A group of top-flight university professors assembled by NZQA to recommend improvements to NCEA reported that the current system "has a number of identified problems". These included:
Changing marking schedules to make results fit a pre-determined standard was a "very inexact method".
It was difficult to make marking more precise using the current approach (where students either achieved a grade, or did not).
Designing questions to give preferred pass rates "tended to result in very inefficient [exams]".
Most sophisticated methods of analysing what exams were teaching students "required a scale".
"For the above reasons, a scale-based approach to marking needs to be developed on a pilot basis and compared with the existing sufficiency-based approach," they concluded.
NZQA insisted last week that the research was business as usual. Deputy chief executive Bali Haque said: "It's our job... part of our normal research stuff. This is not about scaling, this is about improvement, this is about a pilot we're still talking about." He said the new way of marking would address the anomaly whereby a student could gain, for example, "excellence" in many parts of an exam but, if they got "not achieved" in a crucial part, they would be given that mark for the whole paper.
Brent Lewis, principal of Avondale College, said the solution would do nothing but "paper over the cracks". Lewis, who was investigating offering Cambridge International Examinations, said NCEA internal assessment was still unfair and inaccurate.
In an emailed statement, Haque later said, "there is no relationship between the term "scale", which is required in any marking exercise, and the term "scaling", which is a technique that has been used in the past".
The professors who identified problems with the marking of NCEA, and came up with the new system are:Gary Hawke, Victoria University (chairman); Cedric Hall, Victoria University; John Hattie, Auckland University; Jeff Smith, Otago University; Terry Crooks, Otago University.
In the pilot, 500 exam scripts will be marked in a new way.
