Thursday, December 08, 2005

NCEA debacle part II

From the shocking affair last year over NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achivement, New Zealands education standards) comes the great surprise: A repeat!
Japanese and drama are the latest NCEA exams to be re-marked after checks showed disparities in the way they had been assessed.

The latest re-marking brings the total of NCEA standards to nine, including a level-one Japanese, a level-three drama and a level-one economics standard, three English and three mathematics papers.

Oh of course, more like this time they are actually monitoring the results before they come out to avoid embarassment later.
Also yesterday, Education Ministry officials defended the process at a parliamentary select committee where National MP Bill English suggested they were using scaling by another name and "massaging" results to spare the Government the embarrassment of another exam debacle.
Precisely Mr. English, precisely.