Cullen Michael: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
Cullen Michael: Urgent Debates — New Zealand Scholarship Examination—Future 
[Volume:624;Page:19465] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 I thank Bernie Ogilvy for his thoughtful contribution but I must say that I disagree with him on two quite important points in that speech. The more important point is that I do not think it is possible to run the scholarship exam as a norm-based system while simultaneously having a reference-based examination for National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 3 because in effect that would be requiring both teachers and students to be approaching a curriculum simultaneously from a norm-based and a reference-based system during the year. 
Stephen Franks 
: The Cambridge A students do it—thousands of them. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: A few Cambridge A students do it. The Cambridge A student examination reflects very little on the nature of New Zealand society and New Zealand content. 
The old scholarship examination of course ran alongside the old bursary examination. The old bursary examination was a norm-based system in exactly the same way as the scholarship examination was a norm-based system. So it is actually relatively easy to run the two side by side. 
However I also think what many people have lost sight of in this debate and have never really understood was that part of the mess in last year’s scholarship examination revealed what had been an ongoing series of problems for scholarship in previous years that had not been fully revealed and in particular that pass marks amongst a number of science subjects were extremely low in scholarship. For example in biology for one year there were no passes at all. Everybody failed that year. That is an absurdity because clearly if an examination has been set to a proper standard we know that of the number of students sitting biology in a year in New Zealand some of them ought to be passing. What in fact happened was that heavy scaling—not moderate scaling to take account of variability between markers and variability between standards of examinations from year to year—was occurring to lift people who got under 50 percent up to a mark of 88 or 96. I cannot remember now whether 88 was the top scholarship mark or whether 96 was the top scholarship mark; one was bursary and one was scholarship. However everything was scaled to the position of either 88 or 96 for many many years. That is a level of scaling that does an injustice to the notion of scaling as an academic assessment tool. 
I think that the report from the reference group—which was an extraordinarily good reference group—is very very sensible. In particular I think the proposal that between 2 and 3 percent of students should get a scholarship is appropriate. That is why I disagree with the member saying that this is not a scholarship examination. An examination that leads to somebody getting money at the end of the day seems to me to be exactly what a scholarship examination is. I suspect that unlike many people in the House I am one of the few who has had one in the past. Also I think that I am the only person in the House who has ever been a chief examiner for scholarship in a subject. So I do speak with some knowledge about these particular matters although I have to admit it is from an awfully long time ago. 
I think those problems also showed up the difficulty of having examinations being set and marked by university-based examiners setting according to university stage I standards which are not the same thing as seventh form at all. In particular that can lead to for example excessive pass rates in subjects like Maori where stage I Maori is an introductory subject but seventh form Maori includes both people who are native Maori speakers and many who have been learning Maori for 13 14 and 15 years previously. Not unnaturally therefore there was very high pass mark. Stage I in some subjects is quite different from the seventh form curriculum and the skills being looked for in stage I science subjects are often quite different from what is being taught in seventh form science subjects which is why we ended up with some very very strange pass marks indeed. 
Clearly the situation last year was highly unsatisfactory and clearly there was not a good performance on the part of the relevant authorities. Young people in New Zealand do deserve an assurance that the examinations they sit are fairly set fairly moderated and fairly marked and that the marking itself is being fairly moderated. 
Finally for those who still have some starry eyes about these things let me say that—building on my experience in these matters—to some extent one is still marking the teacher as much as one is marking the student at times. I remember receiving a set of scripts in the seventh form history examination for scholarship from one particular school—not a million miles from here I might say—in the Wellington region where they all had it completely wrong. It was clear that this school was the examination centre so all the students had had the same teacher and they had all got it completely wrong. The interpretation they gave while it might have been valid about 60 years before the examination was well out of date by the late 1970s. 
What the marker has to do in that situation is to try to allow for the fact that students have been taught this interpretation and that they are then trying to reproduce as best they can the knowledge that they have acquired. It is a very inexact art trying to mark subjects such as history or English. In subjects such as mathematics very small changes in the standard of the examination can lead to very large changes in the number of people achieving certain levels of pass from year to year. So some degree of comparison and moderation is absolutely essential if we are to do justice to young people. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.