MANDY SMITH
Hawke's Bay college principals are confident their teachers do not manipulate the NCEA moderation system to boost pass rates for students.
The Herald on Sunday reported that a third of students could be leaving school with incorrect grades, and teachers could unfairly boost marks because of "slack" moderation of internally-assessed
work.
Taradale High School principal Stephen Hensman said only a small proportion of work was checked by NZQA and teaching departments chose what they submitted for checking.
But the accusation that teachers were "essentially rigging marks" was hard to believe.
"My impression has always been that of the utter professionalism of teachers," he said.
Stripping teacher registration was a powerful deterrent to cheating "quite apart from the self-imposed constraints felt by one's professionalism".
Mr Hensman said the real issue was the claim that, 29 percent of the time, moderators changed the teacher's decision. While this appeared appalling, schools were merely following NZQA instructions to send in 'borderline' work - work that sat on the margins of achievement levels.
"Schools make a conscious decision to send in their most difficult decisions in order to clearly delineate one grade from another," he said.
"Whenever experts discuss the finest details of work, there is disagreement. You get high court judges overturning the decisions of lower court judges and surgeons disagreeing about the way to best help a patient."
Tamatea High School principal Chris Nielsen said unless one person marked every piece of work in the country, there would be some variance.
"I am absolutely confident that if anything's done incorrectly at our school it is only through human error or misunderstanding, not something in the school where teachers are pressured to lift student marks."
NZQA chief executive Karen Poutasi said moderation was about improving teacher's judgement, not checking to see if they were honest.
It was up to schools to change grades after moderating. However, all five principals spoken to by Hawke's Bay Today said that hardly ever happened.
Mr Hensman said work was moderated the following year, making it difficult to adjust marks.
"When NCEA was first introduced, schools were told that teachers' original marking would hold firm even if the moderator disagreed," he said.
"I am surprised that is no longer the case."
