In response to concerns that New Zealand school students are leaving school all NCEA qualified, but without having even basic literacy and numeracy skills, the Ministry of Education is rolling out a test.
A recent trial of the test found:
- “some of the schools with poor results had good NCEA pass rates” (… so why did they get the NCEA pass again…?)
- “a smaller trial last year saw [school?] failure rates of two-thirds for writing and one third for both reading and numeracy”
- “all Year 10 students at[in?] at least one school failed the writing test”
YIKES! (and that’s not to mention RNZ’s grammatically poor reporting…)
HOW TOUGH ARE THESE NEW EXAMS?
So I thought I’d check out the tests myself to see what they’re like. Going here, I found this:
Clicking on “Literacy”, took me here:
Finally, downloading the “Literacy Learning Matrix”, I got this:
What does the God of Wood and Bone Carving have to do with literacy?!?
… I suspect its not the competency of our learners who are at fault.
At least, when they leave school, they will be qualified to be RNZ journalists…