Soft Credits: how schools raise their achievement levels

By CHRIS BARTON

A story doing the rounds about Cambridge High School's achievement recovery room tells of a group of students obtaining qualification credits that show they can communicate with a business - by booking a bus.

An instructor tells the students the steps involved and to ring a phone number. The call is to the same instructor in another room who pretends to be a bus company executive. The students know this but play along with the charade.

When it is all over they have passed another unit standard worth a few more credits, bringing them closer to the 80 credits needed to gain their National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) in Year 11 (fifth form).

It is a win-win situation.

The kids get an easy result and the school keeps its 100 per cent pass record.

The Qualifications Authority (NZQA) dismisses what happened at Cambridge High as a rare instance of renegade teaching. But Cambridge's practices are not that different from what is going on at schools all over the country.

Cambridge's recovery room brings to light a system that has turned secondary school education into a pick'n'mix of learning that schools cobble together any which way they choose. All in the name of national standards that, in reality, are not very standard at all.

"What has happened there [Cambridge High] is symptomatic of a wider malaise endemic to the nature of the NCEA system," says Avondale College principal Brent Lewis.

"What Cambridge has done is really an extreme version of what is permissible. Schools have set up withdrawal systems for students to go away and do units and are organising little sub groups and classes to do special credits. These patterns are not unique to Cambridge ... it is a logical consequence of the system."

He is talking about a system that puts all schools under pressure to show a high level of achievement, with encouragement from NZQA to find innovative and creative ways of passing students.

"There's carte blanche for all sorts of assessment modes," says Macleans College principal Byron Bentley, who admits, like everyone else, he always wants to raise his school's achievement levels.

"But I want to do it by a system of integrity that is transparent for everyone to see."

Bentley and others are concerned that some schools are bending over backwards to pass students, allowing them to re-sit tests and re-submit assignments so they can show a high pass rate.

"It's not that the schools are being Machiavellian or corrupt - they're being encouraged to find learning experiences and outcomes that can be officially recognised for all students," says Lewis, who is also Auckland Secondary Principals' Association president.

Emeritus education professor Warwick Elley says the pressure to push students through and the variation in policies on re-sits has seen internally assessed pass rates rise while external exam pass rates have decreased over the past two years. "I think they need to tighten up their rules for re-sitting," he says.

NCEA implementation manager Kate Colbert dismisses the year-to-year variations as insignificant and says as long as more learning is taking place, re-sits are appropriate. "What was happening at Cambridge is they were being assessed without a learning programme. "They were being assessed on skills they already had."

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