School staff who experienced the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA)'s literacy and numeracy test website glitch this week say affected students deserve better.
"Students who are really stressed need to be able to rely on the system," a head of maths at a high school, who didn't want to be named, told 1News.
"In general, there is not enough recognition of the stress this puts on students."
The literacy and numeracy tests, as well as equivalent exams for Te Reo Māori-speaking students, will be a compulsory requirement from next year, but some schools opted to participate this year.
Students must pass the exams in order to gain an National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) qualification from 2024, with students able to to resit the tests if they fail.
The maths teacher 1News spoke to reported issues accessing the online test on Monday, Thursday and this morning, while on Tuesday the numeracy and Pāngarau tests were not available. On one occasion, students were kicked off the online system halfway through the exam.
"It's a nightmare," he said. "In general, the changes to NCEA are positive and I'm trying to be positive and lead other teachers through the changes but it's difficult to stay positive."
He said the maths assessment being rewritten multiple times and the timetable for next year's assessments changing from what NZQA had previously indicated had already caused teachers stress.
New Zealand Association of Mathematics Teachers secretary Francis Leslie-Ellis said he hadn't received any complaints about the situation but was aware of the issues.
In an email, he said his school "got lucky" and was able to stick to their schedule, with students sitting the literacy reading exam on Monday morning, numeracy on Thursday and literacy writing today.
Leslie-Ellis said an issue for schools that were unable to sit the online exams would be the doubling of funds required from their operating budgets for reader/writer assistants to help students that require the extra help, if they chose to reschedule the exams for another time this week. The assistance would have already been paid for even if the tests couldn't be completed.
"NZQA should really cover this cost," he said.
Tuakau College, south of Auckland, had students ready to start their numeracy exam on Monday when the website glitch occurred. The issue was rectified 30 minutes later but the school had already told students to leave so they could stick to their schedule for the rest of the day. The school was able to have students resit the test later this week as they had factored extra time slots for issues.
At another secondary school that was affected, students will wait to take the test next year after experiencing website issues, a deputy principal who didn't want to be named told 1News.
"The logistical implications are immense... exam supervisors have to be organised so kids can't cheat, staff are trained at school to run the digital system... On top of that, you need people to relieve staff, teacher aides who had already been paid to supervise the most vulnerable students under special assessment conditions..." she said.
She said while NCEA end of year subject exams are organised by NZQA with schools provided with funding to hire an exam manager, schools are responsible for carrying out the NCEA literacy numeracy corequisite tests.
The staff member was concerned about the impact on students.
"Year 10 students... this is their first experience of a high stakes exam," she said.
The staff member said the exam shouldn't have been implemented in the first place.
"You don't prove your numerate with a one day snapshot, you prove it when you can consistently show you have a skill," she said.
"This is bad pedagogy and badly managed and it’s Year 10s who don’t have the capacity to deal with high-stress situations."
The tests were introduced amid concerns students were leaving high school without a good level of literacy and numeracy skills.
The Ministry of Education was recommended to provide more support and guidance to schools in an evaluation after around half of the students who participated in a pilot of the tests last September passed.
NZQA responds
In a statement, NZQA's deputy chief executive for assessment, Jann Marshall, this afternoon told 1News the digital assessment platform "has generally performed well".
By midday today, approximately 44,399 students had completed 87,732 assessments, she said.
Marshall said assessments were paused on Tuesday morning "while a fix was implemented" after an issue affecting "a small number of numeracy candidates" was identified the day prior.
"Some schools and kura subsequently experienced issues on Thursday morning, when an unexpectedly large number of students attempting to log in at the same time slowed down the digital assessment platform. Once the initial load on NZQA’s systems stabilised, the experience returned to normal. The impact on performance lasted approximately 50 minutes."
She said NZQA "managed the number of students who were logging into the digital assessment platform" to ensure there were no further delays for students sitting assessments today, including "stopping additional students from logging in between 9.16 and 9.55am".
Marshall said the issues experienced in recent days "is the first time NZQA has experienced such large numbers of students attempting to log in to these assessments simultaneously".
"NZQA aims to improve forecasting of when additional capacity will be necessary for the literacy, numeracy, te reo matatini and pāngarau assessments, so this does not occur again in future.
"NZQA sincerely apologises to students and schools who have been impacted."
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