Frustration after ‘tough’ maths exam

Parents are outraged by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s (NZQA) stance after students all over the country toiled through a tough Level 1 Maths exam.

Parents, students and teachers have raised concerns over the NCEA paper, which they said was unusually difficult. But NZQA said it was confident in the quality of the exam, ‘‘which met the specifications available to schools in advance of the school year’’.

Cashmere High School student Max Walker, 16, from Christchurch, said he usually got merits and excellences, but when he opened his maths exam yesterday he had ‘‘no clue’’ where to start.

‘‘I honestly don’t know if I passed,’’ he said. ‘‘I always thought NCEA was pretty all right, but after this I’m feeling angry and frustrated. All my friends are pretty annoyed. They all had the same sort of experience.’’

The exam was made up of three parts – tables, equations and graphs; geometric reasoning; and chance and data. Geometric reasoning was the offending section for Max.

‘‘There were 12-15 questions in total. I probably could only answer three or four and I’m not even sure if I got those questions right,’’ he said. ‘‘It wasn’t really dealing with numbers, which we had been taught in class.’’

Pip Field, who has a son at Rangitoto College in Auckland, claimed maths teachers had not been equipped to adequately prepare their students for a new type of questioning, despite NZQA saying teachers were informed.

‘‘Why, if this is the new curriculum, have none of them been taught it, anywhere in the country? Not good enough by NZQA,’’ she said. ‘‘I know kids from a range of schools around Auckland, and around the country, who are just in pieces.’’

The exam was set by a team of experienced maths teachers and was aligned to the New Zealand Curriculum, NZQA deputy chief executive for assessment Kristine Kilkelly said. ‘‘Students may find some questions in examinations more difficult than others, especially those parts of the question aimed at excellence,’’ she said, ‘‘but students often do better than they expect.’’

Graham Heslop, father of Nelson College Girls student Ruby Heslop, said he was disheartened to see his highachieving daughter come home from the exam ‘‘emotionally despondent’’.

‘‘I was really concerned about her. Just her body language, and where she was at,’’ he said.

Ruby, 15, is an extension-level maths student, but she felt hopeless in the exam. Heslop said this highlighted a gap in communication between the Ministry of Education and high schools.

‘‘What are they going to do for the students that just sat this exam and just shanked it? If high school teachers are very alarmed and the Ministry isn’t listening, students are screwed,’’ he said.

Ruby saw some of her friends leave after 45 minutes – the minimum amount of time students must spend in an NCEA exam room.

‘‘A lot of students raised their hands to leave as soon as the 45 minutes was over. They just kind of gave up. For the first 10 or 20 minutes, a lot of people were just flicking through the paper.’’

She answered as many questions as she could, but felt like she had ‘‘no idea’’.

Kilkelly said the NZQA had received two phone calls from concerned members of the public, along with ‘‘several positive comments’’.

The NZQA updated its assessment specifications every year, which sometimes included changes to the questioning format, she said, ‘‘as was the case in one of the three standards assessed in the Level 1 Mathematics and Statistics examination yesterday’’.

Teachers were familiar with this process because of NZQA’s frequent communication with schools via email and circulars, she said. ‘‘This examination was featured in the workshops run by the New Zealand Association of Maths Teachers and supported by NZQA earlier in the year.’’