Pass rates are higher for less traditional academic subjects

Pass rates for more academically obscure NCEA courses are higher than those for more traditional subjects, figures show.

Community and Social Services, which attracted 57,200 pupils, boasted a pass rate of 64.7 per cent, while less than half (49 per cent) of the 241,303 students who sat English passed.

Arts and Crafts attracted 580 students, and 74.1 per cent passed, while just 56.8 per cent of the 864 students who sat Art History passed.

More students took up, and passed, Business Administration than Economics, or straight Business.

Of the 32, 639 students who sat Business Administration, 64.8 per cent passed, while 56.3 per cent of those studying Business passed.

Other subjects with a high pass rate included Agriculture and Horticultural Science with 66.5 per cent; Dance on 67.4 per cent and Home Economics, with a 62.9 per cent pass rate.

Over half (59 per cent) of the 522,395 students who sat Maths passed and 56.3 per cent passed general Science.

However, more difficult subjects such as Chemistry and Statistics and Modelling also had high pass rates.

Fewer students opted for languages and history than business-based or hands-on subjects. Just 25 students took Latin, but there were a high number of excellences awarded.

The figures represent all levels of the exam.

St Cuthbert's College principal Lynda Reid said one of the benefits of the standards-based format of NCEA was that it offered schools the flexibility to meet a wide range of students' abilities or interests.

She said her school had seen a far greater "robustness and consistency" in results over time.

"One of the things about standards-based assessment is that the standard is specified and if the students reach it they reach it and it doesn't start out with a normal distribution curve necessarily," she said.

Dr Elizabeth McKinley, associate professor at Auckland University's faculty of education, said there was concern that a high percentage of Maori and Pacific Island students opted for less-academic courses that had high pass rates.

Dr McKinley said many low-decile schools offered vocationally-focused courses such as Hospitality as it was recognised some of their students would not want to go to university.

She worried some students were encouraged into these largely internally assessed areas as teachers thought they would be more likely to pass.