NCEA overhaul to be announced

Steve Maharey

The Government is to announce a shake up of the troubled school exams system.

The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has been criticised for lacking incentives for students to excel.

A report last July found students struggled with motivation under the qualification and that the current range of grade levels was not effective.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Steve Maharey said an announcement about "refining" the NCEA system will be made on Tuesday.

Mr Maharey has said in the past that a review of NCEA might look at rewarding top students with more credits and make more difficult subjects worth more credits than easier ones.

He has also said he was sympathetic to changing the fact the qualification did not record failures.

This year, Mr Maharey said most of the problems with NCEA in the past had been fixed but there were design changes to come.

National's education spokeswoman Katherine Rich said her party had been calling for changes to the moderation model for internal assessment.

She said she believed recommendations from the Rhoades report in 2001 would now be implemented by the Government.

That report said there needed to be decent sample size and for that sample of marked work to be selected randomly in order to get a reliable moderation model for internal assessment. The Government had instead implemented a system that saw schools "self-select" marked work, Ms Rich said.

She said: "I suspect they will be trying to do something to appease concerns that the moderation model for internal assessment is not reliable."

Mrs Rich also expected Mr Maharey to say failures would be recorded.

She also expected the Government to address student motivation because "at the moment kids do cherry pick easier courses".

- NZPA