Peter Lyons: New terminology to describe old practice

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) has encountered a problem with an English standard in NCEA. Too many students were not achieving the standard. It has solved the problem by re-marking the students' papers, apparently according to an expected profile of how many students should pass.

To a jaded observer, "expected profiles of pass rates" seems to bear a remarkable resemblance to old-fashioned scaling. The situation would be farcical if there wasn't such a huge wastage of resources involved in chasing an elusive dream.

Standards-based assessment for a National Qualification such as NCEA suffer from a fundamental flaw. This could be called "the conundrum of consistency".

Pure standards-based assessment will never provide consistency between standards, subjects or different year groups on a national level.

There will be large variations between achievement rates within subjects, between subjects and between different groups of students each year.

This is not NZQA's fault. No matter how many CEOs are replaced or directives and clarifications are issued, the problem can never be resolved.

The issue has puzzled humans for thousands of years. Philosophers from early Greece through to the modern age have debated it. The problem is "what is knowledge?" and "what is truth?" As yet, no human being has been able to give a definitive answer to these questions despite thousands of years of debate and discussion.

This all sounds academic and obscure, yet the impossibility of answering these questions has been played out vividly in New Zealand in the ongoing debate about the merits of NCEA and standards-based assessment.

Countless meetings of teachers have argued the correct answer to various questions in their subject areas and there is always variance. Some will be far more stringent than others in their expectations and analysis of what is the appropriate answer.

To obtain unanimous agreement is impossible unless, as sometimes occurs, a strong character prevails and dictates the accepted answer. Debate is usually settled with a tea break and a concession that each teacher should apply his or her professional judgment. This is the nature of knowledge. It is open to debate about absolute truths.

The only discipline that lends itself to absolute truths tends to be mathematics. For this reason, some early Greek philosophers, such as the Pythagoreans, regarded mathematics as the essence of the universe and the source of true knowledge and understanding. Some maths teachers still believe this.

Without being dismissive, it would be a big call for NZQA and the New Zealand teaching fraternity to resolve an issue that has perplexed many of the greatest thinkers in human history. This leaves NZQA will a limited set of options as to how to solve the "Conundrum of Consistency" as it relates to assessment results.

The first option is to ignore the problem. This seemed to work well until the scholarship debacle last year brought the issue of inconsistencies of results to public attention. Ignoring the problem also leads to students making subject choices based on the perceived ease of passing.

This leads to distortions in subject choices and ultimately career choices. Inconsistencies in pass rates also quickly demotivate teachers and students.

Another option is to specify clearly the required knowledge for each standard. Teachers are told exactly what students must write or do to achieve the various levels of each standard. Teaching would be prescriptive based on the requirements of the assessment system.

This method of tightly controlled education has an interesting precedent from Europe's Middle Ages. During this period, knowledge and learning was rigorously controlled by the Roman Catholic church.

The church dictated what was meant by knowledge and truth. Learning was prescribed by the church hierarchy to prevent heresy. This system became known as scholasticism. It was stultifying and retarded any major advancement in knowledge for many centuries. It was eventually overthrown with the advent of the Renaissance and Reformation.

If education authorities in New Zealand decide to solve this issue of inconsistency using a prescriptive approach to defining accepted knowledge, the probable result will be a stagnant, moribund learning environment in our secondary schools.

Students will be taught the exact required answers for meeting the various standards. Original thinking will be discouraged because this will lead to failure.

There is anecdotal evidence this is starting to happen.

The least damaging option available to NZQA to ensure consistency of assessment is to profile expected student outcomes to ensure there is a degree of consistency in pass rates within and between subjects.

* Peter Lyons lectures in Foundation Studies at Otago University.