Qualifications Authority confident marks were fair

Students sitting NCEA outside the northern regions last year were treated fairly, the Qualifications Authority says — despite Auckland students getting far more excellence endorsements.

Thousands of students in Auckland, Northland and Waikato skipped exams at the end of last year after being made eligible for unexpected event grades (UEGs).

Those grades recognised the class time they had lost in 2021, particularly Auckland, which spent four months in lockdown due to Covid.

In lieu of external exams, schools were able to collect other evidence that students had met the required standard during the year.

That appears to have paid dividends for Auckland. NCEA attainment data released this week shows a quarter of year 13s who sat Level 3 got an excellence endorsement, up from 16 per cent in 2019 and 20 per cent in 2020. Similar excellence endorsement levels were seen in years 12 and 11.

Northland and Waikato year 13 students also saw more modest increases of 1 to 2 percentage points in excellence endorsements compared to 2019.

But other regions saw lower marks than 2019, with Canterbury, Gisborne, Marlborough and Wellington’s Level 3 excellence endorsements all falling 1 to 2 percentage points.

Andrea Gray, NZQA deputy chief executive, told the Herald students outside the northern regions would have been treated fairly and assessed against the standard.

She said NZQA had written to schools in December to ask how they arrived at their unexpected event grade figures “to make sure that we could stand by them and schools could stand by them”.

Asked whether differing approaches to UEGs meant some students had it harder, Gray agreed there were differences even between northern region schools.

Internal assessments typically garner higher marks than external assessments, Gray said.

Schools using mock exams to derive their UEGs saw “broadly similar” outcomes to what might have been expected with external assessment.

However, schools that took a more internally-assessed approach to gathering evidence saw marks falling somewhere between the typical internal and external assessment mark.

NZQA’s full annual statistics report will be out in June.