The agony of waiting
Remember when the third week in January brought news that determined your future status – and friends?
for School Certificate results in bygone days.
November 1958. We trooped into the Napier Boys’ High School assembly hall. There were 150 of us, all fifth-formers, all in navyblue serge shorts and woollen shirts, socks pulled up to knees. Yes, we were disciplined and sweaty in those days. We carried fountain pens, filled with Stephens’ radiant blue or blue-black ink, plus blotting paper and ruler. We were about to sit the School Certificate English exam.
Any New Zealander over 35 will remember School Certificate. It came into existence in 1946 and shaped high-school syllabuses and lives for over half a century.
You had to pass School Cert to gain entry to
Form 6 (Year 12, for smooth-cheeked readers). To pass, you had to score 200 or more marks across four subjects.
If you didn’t, you suffered the embarrassment of becoming a second-year fifth-former, repeating the previous year’s classes in the company of smaller, sneering kids. It was a brutal separation into pass and fail. My cousin Joan fell just short of the 200 marks two years in a row. After getting her second lot of results, she went up behind the maize crib on her family’s farm and cried.
“I must be pretty useless, Mum,” she told my Aunt Effie. In fact, she went on to become one of the country’s finest operating-theatre nurses. Yet School Cert labelled her a failure.
On the day I sat the English exam in Napier, Beth Smith was doing the same at New Plymouth Girls’ High. She was the future dux of that school, and future wife of the lucky … me. Four days later, she sat her Latin exam. Yes, Latin – and a few New Zealand high schools were still offering Greek, as well.
Meanwhile, I was smugly writing my history exam. I was good at history; at the school prize-giving three weeks later, I won the Form 5 history prize. The School Cert paper included questions on the American Civil War. We hadn’t studied it, but I’d seen Gone with the Wind, so I decided to answer those questions.
The exams finished in early December, you went off to one of the holiday jobs that were so abundant then, and you waited until the third week of January, when results were announced.
Their announcement was as brutal and absolute as their pass/fail nature. The first you knew was when the names of those who’d scored the vital 200 were printed in the newspaper. On the day, you paced up and down, waiting for the paper to land on your lawn. You rushed to it, searched for your name. What you found or didn’t find determined your status, self-esteem, even your friends for the following year.
It was much the same with University Entrance, the qualification you got or didn’t get at the end of Form 6. Without UE, you couldn’t go to university.
Many skilled jobs were also closed to you.
At least you had two shots at UE. If you scored well enough in internal exams, you were accredited – a sensible, even visionary, approach that dated back to 1944. If not, you had to sit the external exams.
Readers with more textured skin may recall that stomach-clenching time in mid-November when the list of those who’d been accredited was read to a hushed sixth form, or pinned up on the noticeboard, where a mad scrum formed as soon as the teacher walked away.
The first you knew was when the names of those who’d scored the vital 200 marks were printed in the newspaper.
School Cert hung on for decades, largely because employers put such stock in it. You couldn’t get a secretarial job or start most apprenticeships without it. It was finally replaced by NCEA Level 1 in 2002.
University Entrance was eased out by Sixth Form Certificate in 1986, then, in 2003-4, by NCEA Levels 2 and 3.
People claim the old exams were realistic; they prepared you for the fact that life can mean success or failure. Actually, I reckon life is more complex than that. We have triumphs and disasters on many levels, in many degrees. NCEA acknowledges this complexity.
Did I pass my 1958 exams? I did. But Gone with the Wind proved an unreliable narrator. In history, the Napier BHS Form 5 prizewinner scored a humiliating 39%.