The NCEA system is wrong.  Vegetables in a garden, do not grow faster if they keep getting picked out of the ground to check how much they’ve grown. Constantly being tested, watched and graded doesn’t mean you will end up being any smarter nor stronger of a student. Pressure doesn’t work that way.  People are more likely to succeed if they feel there is not a great deal of pressure.

The NCEA system does not work, not for me and not for a lot of people within Mount Aspiring College. But at MAC, NCEA is the only system offered once in year 11. So everyone has to suffer through the long years ahead of level 1,2 and 3. The fact that there is no choice has a serious effect, on the people that don’t perform to there best ability under the ways of NCEA’s testing. Kids within the NCEA system are expected to learn a lot of new material, in usually about 2 to 5 weeks then asked to show all that has been learn’t within an hour. That just makes no sense, not only do they have the pressure of the exam. But the thought of having credits riding on how well you perform makes it unthinkable to do excellence work.

The NCEA system could be improved in many ways, one being that instead of using the current system it could be changed to a way more like the driving tests in New Zealand. Study a topic for a while first then take a written test much like they do now but it would either be a pass or fail. No grading saying excellence or merit. It is proven that if someone gets mostly achieves, they are going to only do as well as an achieved. Because they have convinced themselves that they are average and cant work at the level of the “excellence students”. The driving test again is a great example, pass the test and then have something to show for it. Now driving around is possible, people can see what has been achieved. Whereas once you finish NCEA all there is to show for it is a whole bunch of credits that now mean nothing. By using the pass or fail grading one only has to strive to pass and then feel good about passing not feel bad because they only passed.

Another way it could be changed is we would use passing and failing but everyone would get a percentage back so that it is still possible to differentiate the high passes and low passes without the titles like “excellence student”. As for the credits, this should be changed because trying to do your best and pass is one thing, but to throw the pressure of needing these last two credits otherwise there is no way to pass the year and therefore not going to succeed in life is crazy.

During school most people will be told that you’ve got to work hard and get endorsements or you’ll go no where in life but that right there is a logical fallacy because after school, wether you got 80 credits and scraped through the system or got excellence endorsement in all three years it does not matter. When applying for a job they are going to look at university grades and things like personal qualities and traits, not if you got a merit in your algebra test in year 11. Teachers are constantly saying “these next years are so important” and “these years are the gateway to the rest of your life” well no, while it is a good look having these things on your record, really will a person not go anywhere in life because they weren’t a so called “excellence student”

Now I know it may sound like Im just your average bear saying all this because Im jealous that I am not one of these “excellence students” that I keep mentioning but really I am just trying to make the point that people really do struggle with the way NCEA is run. So i’ll just finish with this said by Albert Einstein “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.”