Mallard Trevor: Urgent Debates — National Certificate of Educational Achievement—Scholarship Examination 
Mallard Trevor: Urgent Debates — National Certificate of Educational Achievement—Scholarship Examination 
[Volume:623;Page:18482] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I will make a very brief contribution in this area. In doing so I congratulate my Associate Minister David Benson-Pope and say that it is not often when one moves on from day-to-day responsibility for a portfolio that one can look back so soon with relief that one is not the person having to front what is a very serious issue. It is a serious issue and there are some enormous dilemmas in front of the Government and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority board around it. 
As members are aware a lot of work was done with National Certificate of Educational Achievement levels 1 2 and 3 to cross-reference and cross-moderate the standards as they were put in place. It is really important to emphasise that the standards were the subject of the moderation not the examination results afterwards. 
That was overall very well done and there were a lot of international compliments. Just to make it absolutely clear I say that people should not be worried about entry standards. Universities as far away as Yale and Princeton have complimented the level 3 system and said that the richness of the information that comes from it is extremely valuable to them when they make their judgments about entry to university. Entry is done off level 3 and it is done in our own universities off level 3 so people should not get too concerned about that. 
By a process that I will accept responsibility for moderation was not done in the same way. The issue was not raised in a way that prompted me to focus on the difference between the standards set for the scholarship examinations. The standards were set on the basis of stage 1 examinations at university level. Tertiary people were involved in setting the standards in every case and although I think it is fair to say that there was some comment to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority from secondary principals I think the full substance of their concerns was not focused on. 
It has become clear especially in the science areas that people who have a lot of ability to reproduce fact and formulae do not necessarily have the ability to put those ideas across and to discuss issues especially in high-quality written English in the way that people who are focused on arts and language subjects have. So a much larger group of people—for example people who are native speakers of particular languages—fly right through the scholarship exams in those subjects and one would expect them to. People who have been involved in immersion education in the Maori language for example have very high pass rates because the standard they have reached is so far in advance of the stage 1 standard at university that it is inevitable we get that result. 
What we now know—and possibly what I should have realised—is that in the past there was enormous scaling to get physics students over the line. They did not meet the standards set so for goodness knows how many years in physics—and especially also in biology—there was a scaling up of examination results in order to get the required number of students through. In a similar way more people met the standard in my own area of accounting and they were scaled down in order to fit a particular curve. 
We now have some honesty around who meets university standards. It is very different but as I indicated to Mr Donnelly earlier in reply to a parliamentary question we have to think a bit more about what a degree means now when our university standards are clearly so different from subject to subject.