Exam errors

Stuff reports:

Teachers say the NCEA maths exams that thousands of students have just completed were riddled with mistakes and contradictions.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life before,” said Rory Barrett, a maths teacher at Auckland’s Macleans College and former head of maths at one of the country’s top schools, Auckland Grammar.

He said he had trawled through each maths exam across NCEA levels 1, 2 and 3 and said there were contradictions and mistakes in at least five papers. He has made an official complaint with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA), which adds to the pile it has received in the past two weeks. French teachers complained last week about a level 1 exam that had bizarre references and was at least two years above the year 11 standard.

Mr Barrett said he had exchanged hundreds of emails with other maths teachers in the past three days and the Auckland Mathematical Association held a meeting last night to discuss the issue.

I’ve never worked out why NZQA doesn’t have the draft exams peer reviewed by actual teachers in schools.

An exam set too tough can be a devastating experience. I remember the 1983 School certificate physics exam was set far above 5th form level. There was stuff in there we had not even studied, and our teachers said it was closer to 7th form level. Even the brightest of our class were convinced we had failed.

As it happened I was amazed to receive a score of 78%, but upon getting my paper back with raw marks discovered the raw mark was 41% and it got scaled to 78%. That left me wondering if a single student had actually passed the exam before scaling!