NCEA results released later today

[pois0n]

wah you guys get alot of credits

i think i got like 95 at level 2 and 113 at level 1

[HardCorePawn]

Can one of you young'uns please translate this for the 'oldies' on here... Preferably into the good old ABC scale (ie. A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, D & E) or perhaps the old 6th form 123 scale (ie. 1 to 7)...

To be honest I have no idea WTH achieved, merit and excellence mean...

[ZK-Brock]

Mmkay.

NCEA is divided up into standards. For example in chemistry I sat 4 standards - Atomic structure and bonding, Chemical reactions, metals acids n bases, and carbon chemistry. These are all externals, meaning you learn the material during the school year and sit the chemistry exam, in which you complete these 4 standards, during NCEA exams. Standards are each worth a certain number of credits, usually 2-5.

You can get not achieved (NA), Achieved (A), Merit (M) and Excellence (E) for each standard. NA is equivalent to failing, A is equivalent to a C, Merit to a B and Excellence to an A, I spose.

I got excellence for Atomic structure, equivalent to an A
I got merit for both Metals acids n bases and Carbon chemistry, so I get 2 B's.
I gopt achieved for chemical reactions, so I get a C.

So overall for chemistry I got an E, 2 M's and an A, or one A, 2 B's and a C.

Structure & Bonding is worth 3 credits, so that's 3 credits at Excellence level (A level)
Chemical reactions is worth 4 credits, so that's 4 credits at Achieved level (C level)
Metals acids n bases is worth 4 credits, so that's 4 credits at merit level (B level)
Carbon chemistry is worth 3 credits, so that's another 3 credits at merit level (B level).

So, after I've sat all my internals (tests for credits during the year) plus externals, I'll have credits at achieved, merit and excellence from all my subjects.

In total, I got 43 credits at achieved level, 67 credits at merit level, and 31 credits at Excellence level.

So - 43 credits at a C, 67 credits at a B, and 31 credits at an A.

[Q300]

Edit: Whoops ya beat me to it ^^^^
Explained it better too

Ok if I translate it into the old ABC,
achieved = C ish
merit = A- ish
excellence = A+

and then theres Not Achieved = Fail thats used in unit standards and stuff.

Its kind of hard to compare it to the old stuff but thats rufly it

[HardCorePawn]

ok... so rather than doing an entire subject... ie Chemistry... you choose "unit's" within a subject and study those???

so does that mean you have to sit like 20 exams?? ie. 4 exams for your chem units... 4 exams for your physics units etc. etc.... as opposed to sitting 1 for all of chem, 1 for all of physics, 1 for all of calculus, 1 for all of stats, 1 for all of english etc... ???

or do they have 1 exam and you just do the sections that relate to your units?

[Mattnz]

QUOTE (HardCorePawn @ Jan 18 2008, 12:54 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

ok... so rather than doing an entire subject... ie Chemistry... you choose "unit's" within a subject and study those???

so does that mean you have to sit like 20 exams?? ie. 4 exams for your chem units... 4 exams for your physics units etc. etc.... as opposed to sitting 1 for all of chem, 1 for all of physics, 1 for all of calculus, 1 for all of stats, 1 for all of english etc... ???

Yes, that's correct

So when you go into (for example) the chemistry exam, there are the number of papers in front of you, based on how many units you studied throughout the year. So, if you studied 4 units, then you will have four different exam papers in front of you. Not massive long papers, they take about 40 minutes each, and you have 3 hours to do them all in.

[h290master]

Passed lvl 1 with 105 credits!!

[ZK-Brock]

QUOTE (HardCorePawn @ Jan 18 2008, 12:54 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

ok... so rather than doing an entire subject... ie Chemistry... you choose "unit's" within a subject and study those???

so does that mean you have to sit like 20 exams?? ie. 4 exams for your chem units... 4 exams for your physics units etc. etc.... as opposed to sitting 1 for all of chem, 1 for all of physics, 1 for all of calculus, 1 for all of stats, 1 for all of english etc... ???

or do they have 1 exam and you just do the sections that relate to your units?

Well no, you go into a single chemistry exam. In that exam you have the 4 standards in front of you, and you get 3 hours to do those 4 standards. Each standard is an exam paper. So you complete 4 papers (therefore 4 standards) in the chem exam.

And you don't just choose any old standards to sit, your school enters you into the NZQA system for the standards they are going to teach you in the year, so you sit those standards either in your end of year exams or in an internal test during the year.

[Alex]

So you don't get a choice insofar as which standards you will sit (unless you arrange it individually with your school's NCEA Principal's Nominee), although up to this year you could choose not to sit papers in the exam and get a SNA - Standard Not Attempted mark. This doesn't impact on any of your other marks and is not the same as a Not Achieved (i.e. fail). However I think that this year any papers you don't write on will be graded as a N/A.

The amount of credits per standard/paper varies, the least I've seen per paper is 2 and the most 6. However most are 3-4 credits per paper. This is decided arbitrarily by the NCEA people in Wellington.

External exams are only a part of the system though. For me this year I had passed already from my internal results (paper's that you have sat during the year), and these are controlled entirely through the school as to which ones you will sit and when (mostly they have them well spaced out during the year) you sit them; the schools then send the results to NCEA. One of the topical issues surrounding this was what was needed to be reported to NCEA; schools are not obliged to report N/A marks to NCEA, only pass marks. This creates an imbalance between schools who do and don't report N's to NCEA, as those that do appear to be not performing as well. Somewhere I heard that they were phasing this out this year or the next, then all schools will report all marks...

Introduced this year was the overall level rating/endorsements. If you get 60 Credits at M or E level you have 'NCEA Level x achieved with Merit', if you have 60 or more credits at E level then you'll get the same but at Excellence. This will apply to NCEA this year, but to have previous years considered I believe you have to send off some $$$ down to Wellington...

The actual marks themselves don't depend on how many questions you get right, but the type and difficulty of the questions. So percentages don't work so well, but I suppose a rough comparison would be; A=roughly 60%-75% M=75%-90% E=90%+.

To confuse things further, there are really two types of standards. Achievement Standards and Unit Standards. With Achievement Standards you can fail or pass with an A, M or E. With Unit Standards you can fail or pass with an A (although final US credits are listed separately on your summary, which makes me think they are different again... but anyway), the reason you'd do a Unit Standard is because it's usually vastly easier than the equivalent Achievement Standard (they all correspond). With Unit Standards you can complete standards and get A credits that you'd otherwise only be able to get in External exams.

However, AS credits overwrite US credits when you've completed both of the set (given that each Unit Standard has a corresponding Achievement Standard). So say I did US5822 and passed, that would give me 3 credits (all the specifics are are made-up btw ). Later, if/when I did the relevant Achievement Standard, if I failed the US credits would remain unaffected, if I passed then the AS mark would overwrite the US mark.

Running with the system isn't too difficult, but the changes make things tricker; I could liken it to someone changing the height of the bar on high jump whilst you are running up...

Of course there'll probably be more questions (it looks really confusing when I write it down, it isn't nearly so complicated in practice...), so ask away.

Alex

[Bandit]

How many credits was understanding the whole NCEA structure worth

That's got to be worth something. Much like in the old days HCP when we got 2 marks for spelling our names right at the top of the page.

[HardCorePawn]

QUOTE (Bandit @ Jan 18 2008, 04:18 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

How many credits was understanding the whole NCEA structure worth

That's got to be worth something. Much like in the old days HCP when we got 2 marks for spelling our names right at the top of the page.

I'll say... It was pretty simple to understand... although in some instances a little unfair... ie. 'scaling', the rather unfair practice of grading on the normal curve... and the ridiculous practice of giving the school a quota of 6th form results based on the previous 5th form results... eg. if you school got 2 A's in english, it would only have 2 1's to hand out in 6th form... WTH?!?!?

Having said that, the old system could have been fixed simply by removing the normal curve stuff and actually giving students the marks they achieved... I remember in 5th form I was bummed coz I got 5 A1's, and an A2... the A2 was in technical drawing... I actually got 91 (this was the actual count from the paper), which was an A1, but was then scaled back to 89 which was an A2...

QUOTE

To confuse things further, there are really two types of standards. Achievement Standards and Unit Standards. With Achievement Standards you can fail or pass with an A, M or E. With Unit Standards you can fail or pass with an A (although final US credits are listed separately on your summary, which makes me think they are different again... but anyway), the reason you'd do a Unit Standard is because it's usually vastly easier than the equivalent Achievement Standard (they all correspond). With Unit Standards you can complete standards and get A credits that you'd otherwise only be able to get in External exams.[/quote]

I'm not so sure I understand the whole Unit Standard/Achievement Standard thing... whats the point???!? Surely you should just learn it once and be done with it?

QUOTE

The actual marks themselves don't depend on how many questions you get right, but the type and difficulty of the questions. So percentages don't work so well, but I suppose a rough comparison would be; A=roughly 60%-75% M=75%-90% E=90%+.[/quote]

It was never really like that in our time either... easy questions were only worth 1 or 2 marks... while harder questions were worth 5-10 etc...

HardCorePawn

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[Q300]

Yes i have to say ill be glad once im done with the hole NCEA and school thing for good!
Still two years to go

[Alex]

QUOTE (HardCorePawn @ Jan 19 2008, 09:32 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm not so sure I understand the whole Unit Standard/Achievement Standard thing... whats the point???!? Surely you should just learn it once and be done with it?

Yea, I suppose theoretically they could do away with the Unit Standards and the system overall would be relatively unaffected. They are (I think) chiefly intended as backup, temporary credits, although they can stand in as regular A credits if you don't pass the corresponding Achievement Standard.

QUOTE (HardCorePawn @ Jan 19 2008, 09:32 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It was never really like that in our time either... easy questions were only worth 1 or 2 marks... while harder questions were worth 5-10 etc...

Yea, I've had a look at a couple of the old scholarship papers for Physics and I think I sort of see how it works. It's not too different under NCEA. Easy questions being A, more difficult ones being M and the really complex ones are E questions. You get an overall paper mark depending on how many of each type question you get right. Without going into A1, A2, M1, M2 (which test different skills within the difficulty range - sufficiency in both is usually needed) etc type questions; basically you'd need say, 8 A questions right to get Achieved, then 3 M and/or E questions right to get Merit, then you'd need 8 A questions, 3 M questions and 1/2 E questions to get an Excellence etc.

You don't know what mark each question will give you, but usually you can tell from how hard the question is, and how it is worded.

Alex

[HardCorePawn]

ahhhh ok... there is a slight but significant difference there... the questions themselves are designated with a 'grade'... so unlike the 'Good Old Day'™, where I could get all the 'easy' questions (ie. 1 to 2 marks) right and still get up around the 75-80% mark and hence a B+ or A grade... now if I only get the 'easy' questions right I will only be able to get an 'Achieved' grade...

i wonder what happens if you get all the Excellence (or Merit) questions right... but everything else wrong??

[Mattnz]

QUOTE (HardCorePawn @ Jan 21 2008, 10:36 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i wonder what happens if you get all the Excellence (or Merit) questions right... but everything else wrong??

They can be downgraded to 'Achieved' marks.

Say if you need 8 A's to get an achieved in the paper, and you get 6 A's, and 2 M's, the 2 M's will get downmarked as A's, and you will get the mark of Achieved over the paper. Also then, if you get all the achieved questions wrong, you can still get the A if you get 8 M questions correct.

[Alex]

Yeap, M and E marks can replace A marks if you are lacking them. Though someone getting all of the hard questions right and none of the easy ones isn't pretty likely lol.

Alex

[flynz]

QUOTE (Alex @ Jan 21 2008, 11:56 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeap, M and E marks can replace A marks if you are lacking them. Though someone getting all of the hard questions right and none of the easy ones isn't pretty likely lol.

Alex

Pretty unlikely aye, I managed it in a 5th form maths internal. I think I needed 3 of the acheived questions right but i only got two and then got everythng else right so still managed a merit.

Also remember that with some subjects such as english its purely subjective and you will just get the one mark for the whole essay as there arent particular questions as such as has been described above.

[Matthew]

QUOTE (Alex @ Jan 21 2008, 11:56 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeap, M and E marks can replace A marks if you are lacking them. Though someone getting all of the hard questions right and none of the easy ones isn't pretty likely lol.

Alex

I did that last year in the Level One Maths exam lol

[brownbox]

Well, I looked on my desk today, and sure enough, there was my NCEA results which came some time ago, and I was obviously never told about it...

I got 160 something credits, mostly M, 13 E, and a whole lot of A's. 1 N in English (who needs english anyways. I is do very goodly with not it.)

[victor_alpha_charlie]

QUOTE (Alex @ Jan 21 2008, 11:56 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeap, M and E marks can replace A marks if you are lacking them. Though someone getting all of the hard questions right and none of the easy ones isn't pretty likely lol.

Alex

I did that in a physics internal and failed ( I was one Achieved mark off getting excellence ) Maybe it was just a practice one but i couldn't 'swap' an E mark to an A and get Merit overall.. If you get me..