In 2002 the NCEA was introduced as a qualification for New Zealand secondary school students. Now, after ten years of debate, contention, intense scrutiny, development and improvement, the qualification is firmly embedded within our education system. What a pity it is then that so many people outside of the school sector have a poor understanding of even the most rudimentary workings of NCEA.
I cringe every time I encounter commentary that describes NCEA as an internally assessed system. Please explain that belief to the thousands of students that sit their external NCEA exams at the end of each year - in fact, there are more external examinations now than ever existed in the previous disjointed, unaligned set of school qualifications.
Of greater concern is the lack of understanding of what really matters for students as they work towards their NCEA. The most important measure of student achievement is the level of qualification a student has gained when they finally leave school.
We will soon be privy to league tables of schools based on the 2011 NCEA results. Like most of my colleagues, I am not afraid of league tables - we are acutely aware of the relative performance of our students and are able to retrieve that information for our own schools and others.
There is so much NCEA data available and, quite frankly, that is partly the problem. I believe that media personnel have access to such a massive amount of information that it creates confusion and it is a struggle to determine that which satisfactorily compares "apples with apples".
Roll-based data exists which considers those students on the roll as at 1 July. Schools rightly complain about this set of data being used for comparative purposes because it includes students who leave school in the second part of the year and those students who may be doing alternative qualifications, thus giving lower school results.
