Education Vs. Creativity

Seltzer · 10-05-2009, 08:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lateralus

^ I didn't realise the NZ schooling system would be that different from Australia's. I'm also actually really interested in NZ secondary schooling at the moment because I'm thinking about moving there for a year or two once I finish my course and am a qualified teacher. So that's pretty interesting to hear.

And yeah I have to say that most the public schools in Australia are pretty fantastic. I've done teaching rounds at both private schools and government schools and the government schools are always better by a mile. Private schools teach by memorisation and very uncreative techniques, and spoon-feed their students because all they want is their school to perform well and get high marks. Government schools over here have come a long way and are really open-minded, creative and innovative in terms of schooling.

I think that Australia has always had slightly higher academic standards than NZ which is perfectly fine, but then NZ switched from SC/HSC to NCEA in 2004 and that was the downfall. NCEA is a standards based system where subjects are broken down into modules assessed as achievement standards or unit standards. Unit standards are pass/fail. Achievement standards allow students to score Not Achieved/Achieved/Merit/Excellence depending on how many questions they answer correctly at each level - no numeric score is actually given for any standard but it is implied that the bands correspond to sub 50%/50%/75%/90+%. My main gripes with it are:

* In the situation where a student answers enough A/E questions correctly to easily satisfy the Achieved/Excellence bands but misses out on the Merit band by one question, their final score will be Achieved. In HSC that question might be the difference between 90% and 85% - in NCEA it means that your grade plummets from Excellence to Achieved... botching up one question out of 15 can completely jeopardise your grade in NCEA.

The reverse applies too - there is no distinction between someone who just makes a low merit (maybe 60% in SC) and someone who makes a high merit (say 85% in SC).

* NCEA was devised to ensure that more people 'pass' their courses and meet university entrance requirements - as long a student scores an Achieved mark for a standard (which is ridiculously easy since NCEA is so dumbed down), then they get the full number of credits for that paper. This blurs the division between people who just scrape through and people who perform flawlessly. The sad part is that it encourages students to think it's acceptable just to scrape through and learn the bare minimum. A lot of people in my school would walk into an exam, do only the achieved questions leaving the merit/excellence questions blank and walk out because it's been instilled in them that the only important thing is passing... as long as they get the credits, it's all good.

* The marking schedules for internal standards can be quite vague which makes it difficult for teachers to apply them and this results in a lot of variation between schools in this area.

Perhaps NCEA has improved since I was at high school but I doubt it. The idea of handing out bluntly unspecific qualitative scores for standards is flawed from the start, and the motivation behind the system is malign. It promotes underachievement. After all, what's the incentive in going for 75% over 60% if you don't think you can get 80%... because either way, you're going to end up with a merit? And why go for a merit when an achieved is good enough?

To be honest, I am slightly embittered that I didn't stay in Australia and do high school there. I was at a selective primary school before I left and I was well set to get into a good selective hs (quite possibly even James Ruse). Instead I ended up going to a random public school here and becoming lazy. Not that it ever prevented me from doing what I wanted to do at uni in the end, but still, I feel like I've missed out.