Reporting "Not Achieved" For Internally Assessed Standards

Planning is well advanced for a big change to NCEA results this year, the reporting of "not achieved" results for internally assessed standards.

In May 2007 Cabinet agreed that from 2008, NCEA results notices should include a record of any internally assessed standards attempted.

Not achieved is already reported on results notices for externally assessed standards.

The change also means that students leaving school will receive a cumulative summary, called a School Results Summary (SRS), of their NCEA results, which will include both achieved and not achieved (N) results.

The final methodology for implementation of the changes was approved by Cabinet late last year. Early this year schools received information on the requirements to assist them implement the changes.

The first phase of project implementation starts this month, including test runs with school management systems to ensure they are ready for the changes.

Deputy Chief Executive, Qualifications, Bali Haque says not reporting not achieved results for internally assessed standards had left the reporting system open to criticism that it wasn't presenting a complete picture of a student’s achievements.

“The purpose of the change is to provide comprehensive information about student's strengths and weaknesses and to report results for internal and external assessment in a similar way.

"In a standards-based context, this means including information about areas of skills and knowledge that students have attempted, but not achieved."

Bali says while it sounds like a simple change, it's a complicated one to implement.

"We are putting a lot of work into ensuring that schools are kept informed about, and prepared for, the changes."

As part of the changes, from next month the previous Record of Learning will be renamed the Record of Achievement.

The next big step for NZQA is the implementation of changes to its batch processing software to enable capture of N results in May. Following this, schools will begin to report the first N results for internally assessed standards from May.

The first N results will go to students on their results notices for both internal and external assessment in January 2009.