Mallard congratulates teachers on NCEA results

The arrival of the first NCEA results is a credit to the secondary teachers who designed and implemented the new NCEA system, Education Minister Trevor Mallard said.

"The NCEA results have shown us two things. The first is how successful secondary teachers have been in making the new system work. The second is how useful it is having results that are so rich in detail," Trevor Mallard said.

"I congratulate the secondary teachers who worked hard to make this new system the success it is. The expert teachers who developed the standards, moderated achievements between schools, wrote the exams and marked the papers have done an excellent job. So have the teachers who assessed the work of their own students and developed their schools’ teaching and learning programmes.

"I also want to thank the Qualifications Authority and Ministry of Education staff for the effort they have put in to getting NCEA up and running.

"The NCEA results themselves show good levels of achievement by students. This suggests sound teaching practice and a growing understanding by teachers and students of what performance is expected in relation to each standard.

"The richness of the results is fantastically useful to students, who can now see 'inside' their subject marks. While in the past they’ve received a single subject mark, students can now see how they performed in each part of each subject.

"For example, an average student who took five subjects last year can see results in about 38 separate standards. What’s more, as well as their own grades of Excellence, Merit, Achieved and Not Achieved, they will be able to see how they compare nationally with other students. That’s something they have never been able to do before.

"The rich information available in these results is also of interest to teachers and administrators. For example in economics, almost all students achieved the standard ‘describe concepts related to consumer choice and demand’. Fewer achieved the standard ‘describe the market’, but those who did, were more likely to do so with an excellence grade. This kind of information will help teachers refine the way they teach in the coming year to raise achievement in standards with which their students struggled.

"I will watch with interest to see how students, teachers, tertiary institutions and employers make use of this new, rich source of achievement information. I’m pretty sure that now they’ve got it, they will wonder how they ever managed without it," Trevor Mallard said.

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