School Certificate Begins Next Week

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28742, 13 November 1958, Page 26

School Certificate Begins Next Week

New Zealand’s largest intellectual exercise, involving 1.000.000 answers by 19.929 students—a third of them in the South Island —will begin next Thursday. It is the school certificate examination, the climax to a phase in post-primary education for its! candidates. There will be as many examination centres as there are days in the year, in places as far away as Tonga. Samoa, and the Chatham Islands. Although at 9.30 a.m. on Thursday almost 20,000 optimists will realise only too well what is in the opening and compulsory: English paper, there will be fewer ‘ than a dozen who know what it contains before that moment. So it is with the papers in the! more than 30 subjects offered. Strict secrecy is maintained in i preparing examination papers.! Within the Education Department they are handled by as few people as possible and. even when they have reached the supervisors in the centres, the envelopes containing the papers are not opened until the day of the examination. At the Government Printing Office, strict security measures are maintained and only four

■ people, including the linotypist ) for each paper, knows the coni tents. The chief reader alone does I j the proof reading. t! Stored in Vault •. The papers are now stored in i the Education Department’s vault, s! Only three people deal with the ' papers or h6‘vh access to the vault. • Anyone else must be accom- ; panied by one of them. Supervisors are selected from among local ministers of religion, retired public servants and other people of known integrity and I ability. Examination papers for the ! school certificate are set by ' specialists who, by their occupaI tion. are closely in touch with : school certificate requirements. A 1 major problem in the conduct of the examination occurs in the i most popular subjects, where the task of marking is shared by a chief examiner and a pane) of assistants. This year there will be more than 50 assistant examiners in English and about 30 in geography. To achieve a uniform standard among panels of assistants in the major subjects, the department uses a “guinea pig” system of photographic reproductions of examination scripts. These "guinea pig scripts” are used to attain a common standard of marking among examiners and in deciding what adjustments are necessary to ensure uniformity The results of the system in recent years have been fairly satisfactory.