School Certificate Scripts

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 1

School Certificate Scripts

Hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper will pass through this room twice in the next few weeks with the hopes of thousands of fifthform school children hanging on them.

This is the school certificate examination depot of the southern region of the Education Department in Christchurch which will shift 63,000 scripts in nine subjects between schools and examiners,

get them back again, prepare marks in individual subjects for punched cards, and then send them to Wellington. The operation began before the examinations started on November 15 and will continue until Christmas. Three cars and a van are constantly collecting parcels of scripts direct from schools in the Christchurch area and from post offices to which they are sent from other South Island centres. In the examination depot I 10 extra casual staff are em- : ployed in addition to Education Department officers from j the school services division i to handle the papers. ;

On arrival every parcel is checked off against the numbers of scripts delivered to each school in each subject. The top sheet with a code number is checked also to see that every script can be catalogued. As each inward parcel is unwrapped, all packing is put in a sack. If a script should be lost, all this will have to be searched. Six sacks have been filled already and there will be about 20 crammed full when the work ends next month. Bundles of scripts are then parcelled into fifties or hundreds, recorded in series, and addressed to the examiners.

As far as possible they all go out the day they arrive. But that is not the end of the job. As papers come back from the examiners, each mark has to be recorded for transmission to Wellington, every paper has to be sorted into series and then stored where it can be located quickly in the event of a call for a recount, query, or other investigation. The scripts will remain stored in this way until well into next year. The picture shows scripts being sorted and parcels ready for posting to the examiners.