Simon Cunliffe takes issue with criticism levelled at NCEA by a recent newspaper article, which he says offers "yet another example of why and how sections of the media today are increasingly held in contempt."
In this meritorious season of prizegivings and conspicuous overachievement yet another predictable and ill-considered little news report breaks wind in the auditorium of learning.
And with it comes the unmistakeable whiff of cultural cringe.
Let me be the first to say that I have been a some-time critic of certain elements of the national certificate of educational achievement (NCEA) as it has struggled to meet its purported goals, and to enunciate others that appeared to have fallen by the wayside in the challenge to devise a relevant and all-encompassing New Zealand qualifications system for the 21st century.
So I have no beef with intelligent inquiry, nor with specific and constructive criticism.
It's just the low-level, casual and ill-informed nit-picking that gets on my wick.
The latest example of this was an article in the Sunday Star-Times this past weekend headlined "NCEA fares badly in university comparison".
The article was based around University of Auckland data which, it is construed, shows that "students who sit Cambridge International Examinations (CIE) are doing far better at university than those who sit the controversial NCEA system".
It supports this assertion with a few bald and unexplained statistics relating to "pass rates for all undergraduates in 2007".
And it goes on to suggest that there is a rush by schools, pressured by parents and a supposed preference of international students, to offer the CIE.
The article's tone and its underlying message is that the NCEA is inferior to the CIE.
There is no context for the data and no authored or peer-reviewed research paper.
Its content is derived from a PowerPoint presentation, which I am informed the journalist did not attend, delivered to a CIE conference in October by Ken Rapson, Auckland University's director of the schools partnership office.
Mr Rapson tells me he addressed the conference and presented the raw data but with accompanying disclaimers and background that put the data in context.
The data was not for public consumption - and certainly not without the context that he was able to provide.
As they stand, Mr Rapson agrees, the statistics provided are meaningless.
They certainly provide unsound foundations on which to construct a headline "NCEA fares badly . . ."
It is yet another example of why and how sections of the media today are increasingly held in contempt.
This is not helped by the author of the accompanying fact box appearing to have a poor understanding of how the NCEA works.
Take this sentence: "Unit standards are internally assessed and achievement standards are externally assessed."
In fact, achievement standards are internally and externally assessed - a rudimentary fact.
But to return to the basic supposition: the NCEA is "controversial" and it is somehow inferior.
First, it is "controversial" mainly to its opponents and to those who have a vested interest in portraying it as such - for example, private companies whose business it is to provide alternative examination systems.
Second, that it can be portrayed as inferior from such an incomplete and decontextualised set of figures is a travesty of interpretation and reporting.
As confirmed by Mr Rapson, a large majority of the CIE students attending Auckland University come from either private schools or decile 10 schools and most of those are highly selective about the pupils who sit CIE: i.e. the brightest of the bright.
There would be something seriously wrong if those students did not go on to fare accordingly well in university exams.
Interestingly, in a faculty such as engineering which pre-selects its students on merit regardless of the qualifications system from which they emanate, the difference between the CIE and NCEA students' performance is barely distinguishable.
As a new system, it was always to be expected that the NCEA would require streamlining and development.
And much work has been done in this arena, in particular the endorsement of NCEA levels with merit or excellence.
Yet it has found itself under constant attack either by those who do not understand it and are too lazy to find out, by those unable to imagine the future and how we might best prepare the coming generations for it, and by those in whose interests it is, or who are temperamentally so inclined, constantly to evoke the past and the examination systems of another era and another country.
If there is a critical acknowledged problem area with the New Zealand secondary education system, it is in its long tail of underachievers.
Whatever else its qualities might be, nobody seems to be arguing that the Cambridge International Examination will do anything to address this.
Instead we get this fatuous perpetration of the myth that the NCEA comes a poor second.
In my book, the article in question gets a "not achieved".
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
