The Government defends NCEA like a flawless new religion that is beyond criticism. But NCEA has problems and while most of them aren’t as spectacular as those at Cambridge High School, they cannot be ignored. If they are, the NCEA will lose credibility in the eyes of the community. The worst outcome could be that a student’s qualification is judged on what school they went to.

Now that all four levels of the NCEA are in action in schools, the Government should review the system to see what is working and what isn’t. It is essential that parents, students and employers can have confidence in this national qualifications.

So what should be changed? Here are five proposals, from a non-expert parent who has had the chance to talk to hundreds of teachers, students and parents, both officially and on the sideline at the sports events.

The NCEA has too much assessment and not enough learning. Students go barely a week without some sort of assessment or mock exam. There simply isn’t enough time for learning, and this problem is compounded by students taking much larger numbers of credits than they need. This can be fixed. Teachers have been diligent to make sure they do everything properly with a new system they are learning themselves. . Recent NZQA policy will require more and more assessment work from teachers. Students need more objective assessment and less of it.

When students are assessed under the NCEA, the credits earned are too variable in value. One credit is meant to take 10 hours of assessment and learning. But students know which are easier and which will take less time. I have seen standards worth three credits that a reasonable student with common sense could complete in a few hours, a fraction of the 30 hours required. Other standards worth three credits require a great deal more than 30 hours work for a student.

It’s widely believed that unit standards are much easier than achievement standards, even where the number of credits is the same. So lets even up the currency, so that the students are treated fairly. No student likes to think someone else has the same results for a lot less work, but it happens all the time.

Internal assessment should be moderated properly. Moderation is about comparing assessments across different classes and schools and scaling results to ensure consistency and fairness for students. Under NCEA, the process for setting and marking internal assessment is checked but the actual results of a student’s assessment are not changed if one teacher’s assessment is out of line. Results are looked at afterwards but it’s too late for the student who copped a bad mark they didn’t deserve. Teachers are expected to judge work against standards that are often vague and general. NCEA relies heavily on the collective memory of School Certificate and bursary standards. As that memory fades teachers will need all the help they can get.

NCEA is not working well enough as a replacement for Bursary. Whether or not the Minister and his bureaucrats like it, students and parents want a national standard high stakes competitive exam like Bursary. Too many schools are choosing to do Cambridge International Exams as a replacement academic exam. NCEA should be credible enough to satisfy the needs of the most academic of students. If it doesn’t it will come to be regarded as a second rate qualification. Universities will end up running their own entrance tests.

Surely this country can produce a qualification for the most academic students. In the end the parents and students will get what they want, so the government should be trying to head off the Cambridge exam by adapting NCEA to include more grades, student ranking and better consistency from year to year so standards are predictable.

Failure should be reported. No failures will appear on a students record of learning. The NZQA use contorted language to hide this fact. Failures in external exams are reported to NZQA but failures in internal assessment are not. Last year up to 45% of students failed (did not achieve) external standards. We don’t know if it was the same for internal standards or if they all passed. Most school principals I talk to believe that if a student is entered in a subject after say the 30th of May or June, then their result should appear on their record. Despite the philosophy that every student should get credits, many won’t. We need to know how many, and why. If we don’t have this information we can’t do anything about it.

NCEA is here to stay, so the government and education leaders need to put aside their ideological baggage, acknowledge the problems and get on with fixing them.