Room for improvement in NCEA marking, admits minister

The Government has admitted there is room for improvement in the under-fire National Certificate of Education Achievement (NCEA).

Education Minister Steve Maharey said today improvements did need to be made to the system but he did not believe it was as big as problem as had been claimed following a Herald on Sunday report yesterday.

The paper said it had documents showing big discrepancies between grades given out by teachers and grades awarded by New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) moderators for the same work.

Overall, 29 per cent of marking checked last year was found to be incorrect. A further 10 per cent was found to be "invalid".

The paper said teachers could push up pass rates for favourite students or to enhance their school's reputation.

Mr Maharey said today that schools sent in scripts "for moderation, not re-marking," he told National Radio. The moderation process was designed to make sure schools were getting good feedback on how their marking was going.

The scripts sent in for moderation were a "subset" of around 4 per cent of all scripts marked. They were on the "borderline" of excellence, merit, achievement or not achieved.

"It's therefore no surprise that around 29 per cent last year, not the excessive 30 or 40 [per cent] Mr English is talking about, were seen to be not as accurate as they should be," Mr Maharey said.

"You wouldn't expect not to have some scripts at least coming through where moderation is showing that they could do a bit better.

"Can we do better, yes we can. That relies heavily of course on professional development of those teachers so they get better and better at assessing.

"We're three years into the system, we're going to get a whole lot better at it."

Rory Barrett, head of maths at Maclean's College in Auckland, had told the Herald on Sunday: "I'm not saying we do it [grade boosting] here. But you'd have to be an idiot not to.

"If I wanted to, I could get my cat through just about any internal unit standard. They're not going to check."

Brent Lewis, principal of Avondale College in Auckland, said most teachers would mark professionally. But the system gave schools a lot of freedom and the anomalies created huge injustices.

Karen Poutasi, chief executive of the NZQA, said the discrepancies were evidence that schools were doing as they were asked and submitting "borderline" papers for checking.

She said it was the responsibility of schools to change grades once they had been moderated.

However, principals told the paper that never happened.

Mr Maharey said it was worrying that "we've got people in the paper literally saying you'd be an idiot if you didn't cheat the system."

The Government would have to talk to teachers about that, he said.

National MP Bill English said the Government was brushing over problems with NCEA "when thousands of students are still getting the wrong results".

Mr English said the Government had to acknowledge the system was not giving results to students that were fair and accurate "and they have to make some larger pragmatic changes to get it to work".

He said checking was happening once it was too late to change students' results.

The assessments the NZQA was looking at were those teachers chose to send in rather than being a sample of all assessments carried out. "It's just too slack."

Mr English said it was not possible to design a perfect assessment system but rorting of the system had to be minimised.

He suggested cross-referencing internal assessment against exam results, an idea Mr Maharey said had "marginal value".

- NZPA