John Roughan: Seeds of exam debacle planted 20 years ago

Terrible things happen to the newshounds when they catch the scent of blood. Like maddened dogs they cease trying to understand what has happened and set about savaging whichever politician or public official is obliged to answer for it.

If the supposed problem is as elusive as this school exam debacle - "it's like mercury," Paul Holmes complained on his programme this week - we turn it into simple politics: whatever has happened, it has become embarrassing for the Government, therefore a head should roll.

But the truth is, not much that happens in education is attributable to the people we elect or even the individuals they put in charge of its administration.

Education, probably more than any other state service, is a self-propelled supertanker of collegial professionals who meet in seminars and form committees and run away with new and exciting, if impractical, concepts.

All large organisations, in the public or private sectors, employ the same sort of brain-storming exercises but the private sector has paying consumers to keep its thinkers' feet on the ground and most other branches of the public sector directly serve voters. School students can't vote and not many parents take much interest really.

The schools that parents seek out, and often pay substantially for their children to attend, usually resist the ideas that well up from unknown committees in Wellington.

But policies such as zoning ensure that there are too few such schools. Neither they nor ministers of education can do much more than moderate peripheral elements of the most dubious schemes.

The drastic reform of senior school examinations began long before Trevor Mallard or even Lockwood Smith had to answer for it, before the likes of Karen van Rooyan and Kate Colbert were on the Qualifications Authority, before even there was a Qualifications Authority.

It probably began even before I was given wind of it during the heady first term of the Lange-Douglas Government, but I have a sense of being there at the creation.

It must have been in 1986 that the Education Minister, Russell Marshall, took several Auckland journalists to lunch to brief us about various plans afoot in his ministry. With him was an adviser, a former Hamilton headmaster, David Hood.

They talked about the evils of the existing examinations, one of which I could recognise. The practice of "scaling" students' marks to produce a predetermined range of results had always struck me as thoroughly detestable.

The reason given for falsifying the marks in this way was that the range of intelligence in students taking any subject in any year was always the same and if the group's results differed from year to year it could only be the fault of the exam paper or those marking it.

I'M sure there are exhaustive studies to support this but it still seems wrong. There could be any number of reasons that exam results fluctuated from year to year, not the least likely being deterioration or improvements in the courses and teaching on offer. So long as results were scaled we would never know, which looked suspiciously like the real reason for the subterfuge.

So when Messrs Marshall and Wood damned scaling, albeit for different reasons, and talked of bringing in exams that gave students a true measure of their achievement rather than the relative measure that scaling produced, I raised a glass to them.

But the exercise went downhill from there. Mr Hood was put in charge of an organisation that was to grow into the Qualifications Authority and under him it was soon making heavy weather of what had seemed to me a simple matter of defining the standard to be expected at each level in each subject.

As years went by the Qualifications Authority was reinventing the wheel, producing dreadful documents full of excruciating jargon and conceptual frameworks and based on the profound delusion that "internal assessment" by schools could be as valid and credible as national exams.

It set about reducing all subjects to units of mechanical skills which pupils could master at their own pace and be given multiple opportunities to do so. The testing methods were entirely up to schools except that they ought not rely too much on written exercises, or even formal tests.

In response to constant criticism of the proposed National Certificate of Educational Achievement Lockwood Smith managed to get three grades put into the plan and Trevor Mallard, right on the eve of the NCEA's introduction, insisted that students also be given a grade average expressed as a percentage mark.

It was Mr Mallard, too, who announced in 2001 that a scholarship exam would be offered alongside the NCEA when it supplanted bursary in 2004. The scholarship would be awarded for the top students in each subject and in each school who reached the set standard.

The consternation heard since the results were posted last month suggests that designing objective criteria, and marking to them, is more difficult than you and I can imagine.

The first NCEA scholarship seems to have been too hard in some subjects. But there were also tales of students awarded a scholarship for work that had not made the grade in the standard assessment for seventh formers.

Either way, there is a delicious irony for the designers of a system that was accused of dumbing down education and abolishing failure. I pulled the level 3 history standards off the web this week and, frankly, I didn't face anything as demanding in my final year.

If there is a flaw in the new system, there is not much point blaming today's politicians or public servants. It was not their initiative and nothing will be resolved by a political sacrifice. The bloodhounds are barking up the wrong tree.John Roughan is a Herald assistant editor.