Reason 3,045 why the NCEA should be dumped

Thursday 10 Feb 2005
Deborah Coddington
Press Releases -- Education

Each day brings more evidence from parents calling for the NCEA to be scrapped, ACT Education spokesman Deborah Coddington said.

"Today a father whose son sat NCEA scholarship exams phoned me to point out it's not just the biology scholarship result that's the problem - the calculus and history exams are also scandalous," Miss Coddington said.

"For history, students studied hard all year on topics concerning Treaty issues because they'd been informed this was what the exam would cover. However, when they saw the exam paper the questions concerned a completely different area of New Zealand history; nothing they'd encountered during the year.

"In level four calculus, the same issue dumbfounded students - the exam was out of the syllabus and covered material students had never seen before.

"These are not 'teething problems'. NZQA can't be excused through 'lack of resources'. The NCEA is fundamentally flawed.

"ACT says our students should not be used as guinea pigs. It's time to dump the NCEA and bring back internationally-recognised external exams," Miss Coddington said.

ENDS

For more information visit ACT online at http://www.act.org.nz or contact the ACT Parliamentary Office at act@parliament.govt.nz.

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