August 29, 2002

Sixth Form Certificate Grades Will Be Meaningless, Says Donnelly

“Our national school’s qualification system is entering a nightmare phase,” says NZ First education spokesperson, Brian Donnelly.

“Once the public understands how Sixth Form Certificate works, it will realise the conundrum the system faces”.

“Sixth Form Certificate grades are generated by the pooled marks of students in their School Certificate assessments the previous year. Students doing Sixth Form certificate in 2003 will not have sat School Certificate so there’ll be no way to allocate grades”.

“To make the matter worse the PPTA is saying they won’t participate in NCEA Level 2 and the Minister is saying that it will be optional”.

“Officials are going to have to cobble together some system which cannot make any educational sense. Presumably they will use the NCEA Level 1 grade point average which itself doesn’t make sense”.

“The Government may as well put a whole pile of grades in a hat and ask schools to pull them out. Sixth Form Certificate grades will be totally meaningless. A monumental fraud is about to be visited upon the public of New Zealand,” said Mr Donnelly.

ENDS

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