Andrew Dickens: What should we do with NCEA?

So here we go again. A national conversation about whether NCEA is C.R.A.P

A damning Government briefing presented in June has raised significant concerns about the credibility of New Zealand’s main secondary school qualification.

It’s worried about the flexibility built into NCEA, including regarding what assessments students sit, means courses can be structured around those perceived to be “easier” to accumulate credits.

The briefing says the system encourages students to stockpile credits across often disconnected subjects at the expense of engaging in a “coherent” course that supports a clear pathway for their future.

The kids are also passing courses based on internal assessments. Many are avoiding external examinations. More than 250,000 kids students skipped exams last year.

The briefing says that the qualification is hard to assess if you’re an employer and it’s hard to compare it with anything internationally.

So Erica Stanford is working on proposals, and I’d like to know what you think she should do with the system.

This morning Mike Hosking asked Auckland Grammar's Headmaster Tim O'Connor what he would do: 

"I think you change it to an examination based system. We make it pretty simple. Here's a thought, we assess at against the national curriculum because currently in NCEA doesn't do that. So the primary mode of the system is examinations that would give benchmarking across the country. Every student whether you're in Invercargill through to Auckland. you'd know where you stood. And you can have some internal assessment in it because not all types of content, you know, are best under exam conditions, but these should be marked by NZQA. Teachers wouldn't mark their students own work, no, and they shouldn't receive their marks back before they get their externals back." 

Now, both my boys did NCEA and they’re literate and numerically great. It did not fail them

In fact my oldest had the choice of doing NCEA  or International Baccalaureate.

So, why did we go NCEA?

It’s because that boy was dyslexic and dyspraxia.  He cannot write well and his spelling is atrocious.

So a system that had a large quotient of internal assessment catered for his learning difficulty.

But the difference between his school and others is that the school made sure that the standards of IB were replicated in their teaching of NCEA

The concentrated on the basics, which is not just reading writing and arithmetic. They also included science and social studies. Social science, including history and not just New Zealand history, but the history of the world over the past 200 years in particular.

They didn’t include the so-called cheat courses like barista studies reasoning if you want to learn how to be a café worker you can enrol in extramural courses

He got a great education and has gone on to have double degrees and a thriving professional life

My point here is that one of the main problems of NCEA is not the system, but the way the schools teach it and the abdication of parental input into the student’s choices.

You can’t just sit back and complain that you don’t understand how it works as a parent. You have to educate yourself if you want your children to be adequately educated for their future and the chance to do even better than you did.

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