Hon Bill English
National Party Education Spokesman

10 January 2006

Scholarship students benefit from huge changes

National’s Education spokesman, Bill English, says students and teachers should be pleased that NZQA was forced into major changes to scholarship exams after last year’s debacle.

NZQA today announced that marking of this year’s exams is proceeding smoothly

“Under massive pressure last year, NZQA made major changes to scholarship, abandoning their standards-based experiment on the advice of experts brought in to avoid a repeat of the shonky 2004 results,”says Mr English

“A standards-based system could never rank students sensibly and even though they never officially announced it NZQA followed advice telling them to use more traditional exam setting and marking techniques.

“NZQA must now be pleased they were forced into fundamental changes that mean this year’s results should be credible and consistent.”

Mr English says the turnaround on scholarship shows the problems in other NCEA levels can be fixed

ENDS

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