THE PRESS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1989. School Cert, under fire

Press, 6 September 1989, Page 20

THE PRESS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1989. School Cert, under fire

The School Certificate examination will be phased out from 1992, if the educational advisory group to the Government has its way. The Opposition spokesman on education, Dr Lockwood Smith, says this would be a grave mistake and, if he became Minister of Education, he would consider reintroducing an external examination. Many people will share his reluctance to replace the external examination with internal assessment.

Parents and employers have come to value School Certificate as a guide to pupils’ abilities. Those with an interest in education, but who are not teachers or education theorists, appreciate that external examinations measure not just the abilities of exam candidates, but also the quality of teaching and the effectiveness of the school system.

Abolishing the externally set and externally marked School Certificate examination and replacing it with internal assessment of pupils’ abilities has been promoted for a long time. Many people favouring a change from external examinations argue that it is unfair to send out half the candidates each year with a sense of failure.

That arises from the way in which the School Certificate examination is marked: it is arranged so that a statistically determined percentage of candidates sitting a subject will pass. Thus the grades awarded in the examination results do not reflect a candidate’s absolute ability in a subject, but only a relative ability when compared with the other pupils sitting the same subject in the same year. Doing away with external examinations is only one possible response. The objection to failing half the candidates can be met by Dr Smith’s proposal to change the nature of the examination. He argues that it should be a criterion reference examination; that is, standards should be set and if 70 per cent of those examined meet the required standard, then 70 per cent would pass. The bleat from, among others, the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association, that the examination is “a ranking device” and does not measure how well students are achieving, is flim-flam. Teachers can provide assessments of how well particular students are overcoming their inadequacies if that is what teachers want to do; but, in the tough world outside the classroom, ranking counts and that is an argument for retaining the examination, not abolishing it.

The basic problem about abolishing all

external examinations is that some schools will conduct their own external examinations, and these examinations will stand a chance .of becoming ah important qualification. Only those parents who can pay, or those who live in certain school zones, will be able to send their children to these schools to obtain the qualification.

Some schools would see it to their advantage to promote the idea that they would establish an external examination, and this would encourage parents to choose these schools. A few years ago, when the then Minister of Education, Mr Marshall, broached the subject of abolishing School Certificate, a number of private schools in the North Island promptly floated the idea of establishing their own external examination to replace it. On the other hand, the present examination appears to disregard differences in social and economic backgrounds, differences between schools, and differences among people of varying racial backgrounds. It has appeared to be an equaliser in a society that likes to be thought of as egalitarian. Those who depend on School Certificates as a guide, such as employers, will have reason to consider, even more than at present, which school a young person has attended if internal assessment becomes the sole measure of a pupil’s abilities. To remove any inequalities in a system of country-wide external examination by abolishing it, is not necessarily to guarantee that other injustices — as bad or worse — will not beset the new system of appraisal. The examination indicates a pupil’s particular abilities in particular subjects. It can do no more and it need do no more. It is not intended to take account of all variables of aptitude, diligence, or examination nerves. These shortcomings might well provide a sound argument for a separate and additional internal assessment of a pupil’s abilities other than those that can be measured by examination. They do not provide a reason to scrap the examination system.

The truth of the matter is that more and more employers are putting job applicants through some form of testing closely attuned to the particular job. Without the base reference of School Certificate, employers would be forced to seek more extensive examination of job applicants, just to confirm elementary literacy and numeracy. Such a system, conducted outside the education system, would be more unfair than any of the perceived inequities of the existing test.