Bursary barrier to genius

By STACEY BODGER and REBECCA WALSH

New Zealand's future computing geniuses face a hurdle before their careers have started because they cannot gain a senior school qualification in the subject.

Computing teachers say students are being deterred from studying information technology because it is not offered at Bursary level.

And they believe new secondary school qualifications will worsen the problem because computing may be assessed in the same way as other subjects, including woodwork and food technology.

Wellington High School computing teacher Martyn Leda said students were bypassing the subject in form seven because it was not available at Bursary level.

Students instead chose traditional "academic" subjects such as physics, which would count towards their Bursary score.

"Then they carry on with those subjects at tertiary level, and the country loses out on a whole raft of people we need to one day support a knowledge economy," said Mr Leda, a member of the New Zealand Information Science Teachers' Association.

Around 100 students were studying sixth-form computing at Wellington High this year.

But only 27 seventh-formers were taking the subject.

Upper Hutt College's head of computing, Paul Curry, said the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) would generalise computing if it was assessed using the same standards as other "technologies."

The certificate is scheduled to replace senior school qualifications in 2004.

"We feel people are going to get a whole lot of surface skills without the depth they require," Mr Curry said.

Education technology consultant Laurence Zwimpfer said computing was not "just another subject" and should not be assessed as though it were.

"You can't take a 'one size fits all' approach that would dumb computing down," he said.

"Other technologies are relatively stable, whereas computing is evolving so rapidly that it's impossible to compare them."

But Mr Zwimpfer believed that computing should not be constrained to a curriculum, because it would constantly be outdated.

Fiona McGrath, teacher and coordinator of the National Certificate in Computing at Auckland Girls' Grammar School, believed students would receive higher computer qualifications under the NCEA.

They would also be better prepared for university courses with emphasis on computing.

The Ministry of Education's NCEA project manager, Tim McMahon, said the ministry was considering developing separate assessment standards for computing to address teachers' concerns.

Mr McMahon said that under the new certificate, schools could choose to assess computing using standards developed by the computing industry instead of the technology standards.

He said the NCEA would give computing equal status to every other subject.