QA News April 2010 - Issue 67
- Chief Executive's foreword
- Course Endorsement to add further motivation for students
- Top Art on tour
- More students gain NCEA endorsed certificates
- Literacy and numeracy standards proposed
- NZ Scholarship results
- Changes to the qualifications system
- TEOs encouraged to do business online
- External reviews of value
- Deregistration a possibility for non-complying PTEs
- Exemplars for internal standards now online
- Best Practice Workshops
- Workshops for teachers and whanau
More students gain NCEA endorsed certificates
January and February are a busy time for NZQA with the release of secondary school qualification results to students. More than 141,000 students had their NCEA results notices posted out to them from 13 January.
Results showed a slight overall increase in the number of students gaining endorsed certificates, introduced in 2007. To gain NCEA endorsed with Excellence, students require 50 credits at Excellence. An endorsement with Merit requires 50 credits at Merit (or Merit and Excellence).
Results from 2009 show (percentages from 2008 in brackets):
- Of 50,236 candidates gaining NCEA level 1, 11,367 or 22.6% (23.2% in 2008) gained a Merit endorsement and 3182 or 6.3% (5.9%) gained an Excellence endorsement.
- Of 41,710 students gaining NCEA level 2, 7204 or 17.3% (16.9%) gained a Merit endorsement and 2043 or 4.9% (4.1%) gained an Excellence endorsement.
- Of 22,520 candidates gaining NCEA level 3, 4785 or 21.2% (20.5%) gained a Merit endorsement and 1171 or 5.2% (4.8%) gained an Excellence endorsement.
- A total of 20,454 candidates gained University Entrance.
NZQA Deputy Chief Executive, Qualifications, Bali Haque said the results were encouraging.
"The results are consistent with previous years, but there is an overall increase in the proportion of students gaining endorsed certificates. This indicates that Certificate Endorsement is proving a motivating factor for students."
NZQA's call centre staff answered more than 2300 calls on 14 January, also responding to nearly 1100 emails.
At the same time, the number of secure logins to the results online on 14 January 2010 was 58,800, compared with 54,400 on the results release day the previous year – an increase of almost 7.5%.