Peter Lyons: NCEA pass rates hard for parents to cope with

NCEA is quite different. Students have much greater choice about how and when they are assessed. Photo / Greg Bowker

I was at my sister's house for dinner the other night. My nephew is sitting level 1 NCEA. He nonchalantly stated that he had almost missed an exam last week because he thought it was in the afternoon when it was actually in the morning. He consoled his despairing parents by assuring them he already has enough credits from his internal results to pass. I admired his relaxed stance. His parents were less enthusiastic.

But his parents' views are shaped by careers in the highly competitive corporate world. NCEA is not like that. Things have changed. In our day we sat School Certificate. It had the nasty element that students were ranked against their peers. In each subject half the students were automatically destined to fail. For most students there was a dread of failing and being forced to repeat the entire year. This was a hugely motivating factor. Assessment had sharp edges.

NCEA is quite different. Students have much greater choice about how and when they are assessed. They can pick and choose which credits they want to do. Some of the credits are done in the school. Others can be done at the end of the year in external exams.

My nephew is smart enough to have figured out how to work the system. He knows how many credits he needs to pass and how he can shop around to get them as easily as possible. It is all about freedom of choice. He has figured out that it is much easier to pass internal assessments than the external assessments sat as exams at the end of the year. In some schools the pass rates for internal assessments are over 90 per cent. The pass rates for external exams for the same school can be less than 50 per cent.

My nephew has also figured out that certain subjects and certain units within these subjects are much easier to pass than others. He has also developed the approach of meeting the required standard in a subject with the least effort. It is a type of efficiency. Economists call it "satisficing" which means getting the most by doing the least.

Meanwhile, those in charge of the system seem to have realised that the best and cheapest way to raise success rates under NCEA is to get students to sit a greater proportion of internal assessments rather than external exams. So these days more assessment is set and marked by teachers within their school.

The Minister of Education, Hekia Parata, trumpets the big improvements in pass rates for NCEA in recent years. With more of the student work being marked by their teachers within their schools the improvement in pass rates has been significant. This Government has set a target pass rate for level 2 NCEA of 85 per cent. It is good to have targets and to find easy, cheap ways to achieve them.

So students are getting more credits, teachers appear to be teaching better and politicians are proud that our national education outcomes appear to be improving. We are all winners. Since 2004 NCEA level 1 pass rates have increased by 19 per cent, level 2 by 16 per cent, level 3 by 13 per cent.

I arrived at the staff meeting at school the next morning eager to share my new insight about how we are all doing a much better job under NCEA. I sat next to a teacher who is marking NCEA scripts for the external exams. The chief examiner had said that he and other markers had to re-mark their exams. Apparently they hadn't given out enough excellence marks. I said to him that I thought NCEA was leading to much better success for all students. We should all be celebrating because we are doing a better job. He just smiled sadly at me. He then headed off to re-mark his scripts to ensure more students achieved excellent pass rates.

Ms Parata says that NCEA is "profoundly democratising". This is because unlike previous assessment systems "it doesn't ration educational success". I'm not sure what she actually means by this but my nephew thinks it's pretty cool and cruisey. His parents are more uneasy about it. They don't understand how under NCEA everyone can be a winner. They also find it hard to reconcile the dramatic improvements in NCEA pass rates with our slide down international measures of student achievement. They just don't understand how education works in New Zealand.

• Peter Lyons teaches economics at St Peter's College in Epsom.

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