ORGANISATION OF EXAMINATIONS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29339, 19 October 1960, Page 6

ORGANISATION OF EXAMINATIONS

Education Department Problems (A«w Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, October 18. Diplomatic bags to Burma, Thailand and Borneo will soon, for the first time, be used to deliver school certificate papers to candidates sitting in far-away places. The same method will also be used to return the completed papers. Getting papers to and from candidates in strange places—usually the candidates have parents in the armed forces or diplomatic corps—and , arranging examination supervision are among the many problems which confront the Department of Education’s examining division every year.

This year it also has a candidate who is not sure where he will be to sit for the school certificate. He is an engineer aboard the vessel Karamu, which will arrive in New Zealand in late October. Where it goes from there nobody in the department so far knows. •Candidates in London, the Pacific Islands, and blind students requiring Braille papers are among the 23,000 school certificate aspirants this year. The school certificate alone is not all of the division’s troubles, for there are eight other examinations— a total of 35,572 candidates and 500,000 papers—to be held about the same time in November.

Papers for these other examinations are also often sent to out-of-the-way places. This year two men at Scott Base, Antarctica, will sit the New Zealand certificate in engineering. The division has made arrangement for the examinations at Scott Base to be supervised, and United States Antarctic expedition transport will carry papers to and from the base. The examinations division is yearly faced with increasing numbers of candidates. In the last two years the number of school certificate candidates alone has jumped by 1500 each year. Next year it will rise by 2000 to 25,000 candidates, and by 1963 it will reach 32,000.