Dialogue: Dump outdated testing and improve standards

By BALI HAQUE*

Cast your mind back 20, 30 or even 50 years. Imagine you are 15.

You are queuing nervously outside the school hall, about to sit School Certificate English. Your teachers have prepared you for this examination. You have learned and memorised all you can. This is the big test. What happens to you in later life will be significantly affected by how you perform in the next three hours.

Sound familiar? Despite major changes in our society, economy and technology, despite the fact that educational needs today are hugely different from those 30 years ago, the same ritual of testing is continuing.

And it will continue forever if leaders of schools such as Auckland Grammar are allowed to dominate the debate about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement.

The focus should be about how to meet the qualification needs of all students, not about meeting the needs of a few students at schools that wish to remain locked in the middle of last century.

There is widespread and considerable support for the national certificate. It is time to set the record straight.

Most principals support introducing the certificate (as evidenced in votes at principals' conferences) because it represents a significant move to maximising students' learning, and to ensuring that all students can share in an educational system that rewards achievement.

The national certificate will be far better than our current assessment and exam regime.

All the evidence indicates that most parents support it when its philosophies and ideas are explained. To suggest that parents will be confused is arrogant.

Most teachers also support the certificate's introduction (as evidenced by votes at conferences and by ballot), although, rightly, many are concerned about workload issues.

The certificate has also had significant support from the academic community. Professor Black, of King's College, London, an expert on assessment, endorsed it, and commented on the sound principles upon which it is based. Professor Black also made suggestions for the certificate's development, which no doubt will be addressed as the system evolves.

Most employers' representatives have also endorsed the proposals.

The universities have been represented on the development group for the national certificate. Work still needs to be done on University Entrance and this is progressing well.

The argument that there is still uncertainty about important parts of the certificate's implementation is invalid. None of the changes proposed are revolutionary. They have resulted from growing dissatisfaction with our system, and sometimes heated debate and consensus-seeking in the education community.

This consultation has been genuineand worthwhile. Unfortunately, opponents of the proposals chose to withdraw from this process, despite repeated attemptsto include them, and to develop the proposals to respond to their often genuine concerns.

Under the national certificate, at least half of each subject must be externally assessed - generally by exam. Skills best tested by formal exam will be tested that way.

The rest will be tested internally by the teachers who work in them. This internal assessment will assess those skills and concepts which an exam will fail to test - for example, oral work, research work and performance-based work. Many of these skills underpin the needs of a modern economy and society.

Students will be judged on a four-grade scale. The top grade of excellence will be just that, and will be designed to stretch the most able. The lowest grade, a no credit, would represent a poor standard.

Results will show how each student performed compared with every other student. In addition, they will provide a grade average (a mark) for each subject or area of learning.

Students will not necessarily be sentenced to a "fail" for the year's work in a given subject. Instead, they will be given a record of their achievements on that four-point grade scale for each topic or achievement standard they study. Most subjects will be divided into five to seven such topics or achievement standards.

The final results will show a student's strengths and weaknesses in far more detail than a single mark.

These are clear, comprehensive, well-thought-out decisions, all of which are reasonable, useful and appropriate.

Critics suggest that the internally assessed part of the national certificate will lead to a decline in standards. This argument is based on a distrust of teachers' professional judgment and, more importantly, on the assumption that an external exam provides a more accurate judgment of a student.

Can we really judge what a student knows solely by subjecting them to a three-hour test, which tends to emphasise memory and ability to work under stress?

Proponents of external exams are well aware that the teaching strategies required to achieve success in them tend to be narrow and militate against real deductive learning.

Internal assessment is likely to expose these strategies as being inadequate and unhelpful for the future, either in the tertiary sector or the workplace.

Internal assessment is used successfully at Sixth Form Certificate level and in several School Certificate and University Bursary subjects.

More comprehensive systems will be needed to ensure fairness between schools as they apply the new internal assessment. Trials for such systems have been successful. There will undoubtedly be problems, and debates about how effective these checking systems will be. The point is that they have to be developed.

To reject the whole initiative, to rush to an overseas creditation, such as the Cambridge University examination, is a lamentable nostalgic attempt to hold on to something which is not working for us as a nation.

Attempts have been made to modernise our assessment systems several times over the past 20 years. Almost without fail they have been opposed by a few who remain fearful of change and who wish to maintain their self-appointed status as protectors of standards.

Many others are also interested in standards and are committed to raising them. The national certificate provides exciting and challenging opportunities to really make a difference for our children.

It is time to be positive and get on with it.

* Bali Haque is the principal of Rosehill College, Papakura.