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Dear Parents and Caregivers
The NCEA year continues to roll on with a lot of assessment taking place as part of the overall Teaching and Learning programme at Year 11. As we head towards Term 3, the ‘moving term’, there are a number of issues and reminders that I would like to cover. We’re already into Week 18 of the academic year, with (amazingly so) just 15 weeks left, so this newsletter encourages busy parents to take a few minutes to check in on your child’s progress in their NCEA journey and to look ahead at what is to come in Term 3.
In my previous newsletter, I presented this very simple model of your child’s Level 1 journey.
So… the situation for each student is as showing in the model – quite a bit of internal assessment completed, credits gained and increasing and a likely very busy term to come following the two-week holiday. You’ll see that there’s still more assessment to take place (you’ll possibly wonder what “lots of internal external assessment” means in practice), there will quite possibly be events and commitments alongside your child’s academic life and of course there are the College Prelim examinations. What the model doesn’t show is the 2025 course selection process that happens in August too. More to come on that at the end of this newsletter….
At all times, please feel free to contact me via email with any questions that you may have about NCEA at DBV@stac.school.nz.
Kind regards
David Bevin
Head of Teaching and Learning
In May, Years 10 and 11 students sat a number of assessments for the LitNum co-requisite. The 20-credit co-requisite is required for a student to gain any NCEA Level award and, while we have yet to see any results (they will be available in early August from NZQA via a student’s Learner Login), many Year 11 students will successfully gain this co-requisite requirement this year. All Year 11 students sat the Literacy – Writing assessment and a number also sat one or both of the Literacy – Reading and Numeracy assessments. Results are awaited with great interest.
Internal assessment is obviously the big concern for students this year. We have clear rules and procedures for students to follow covering many matters including student absence from an internal, late submission, breaches of authenticity and these are all detailed in the student copy of the ‘Rules and Procedures’. All Year 11 students received their own copy of the ‘R & P’ in Term 1; they must be sure to read them as the rules must be, and are, applied in all assessments. There are 4 main rules that feature prominently in assessment ‘life’.
NCEA DOCUMENTS FOLDER >
Issues around extensions and absence from assessments occur every year and have begun to occur already so it is important for you to know that we have clear processes and rules for managing those issues so that assessment is fair to all students. Students simply cannot just hand in an assessment late or not turn up to a test without having a valid, and approved, reason. They must follow our procedures in this area.
Earlier in Term 1, a post was placed in each year level’s Teams page providing the link to the online form for applying for an extension in an NCEA assessment. It is really important that students follow our rules for assessment so that we are being fair, consistent, and transparent in all assessment situations.
There are several steps for you to follow with each internal assessment.
For medical conditions, students must provide a medical certificate as part of their application as shown here; If they do not, they will not have an extension. This is non-negotiable on the school’s part.
COVID-related illness – our system is designed to handle this situation that has been occurring frequently over the last few months. Students are not required to visit their doctor to obtain a medical certificate. They are still required to provide proof of their COVID illness, and this can be done in the form of a photo of the positive COVID test that is uploaded directly to Mr Bevin as an email attachment along with the student completing the above extension application form.
All students are required to sign a College Authenticity statement each year that underlines the importance of what we call academic integrity. Simply, students should not produce and submit for assessment work that is not their own. They may reference other work but must do so formally and according to the guidelines they receive from their teacher; if a student breaches authenticity, they will likely receive a grade of ‘Not Achieved’.
Much assessment requires students to submit work online such as through a Teams submission. While we are all aware of the sometimes-unpredictable nature of technology, students are expected to still submit work on time and as required for their assessment. Students are expected to make copies or backup their work so that, in a situation of technology failure, they are able to access a copy of their work and submit it on time. Work that is submitted late, even if technology failure is a factor, is just that, late and will not be accepted for marking.
This very important calendar provides overview information about what assessments are on when, according to each Year level. Please note that assessment programmes are of necessity a little ‘fluid’ and therefore dates sometimes change; teachers are expected to keep students and parents informed of such changes so please understand that what is on the Calendar, while it’s accurate, is not ‘set in stone’. The Calendar provides an important way of helping your student to programme their commitments term-by-term.
If you look back at the year ‘journey’ you’ll see that the next term is 10 weeks long and that there’s likely to be a lot going on in your child’s academic life for one thing. There’ll be more on that in my next newsletter early next term.
By early July, the Assessment Calendar will show assessment dates for internals in each subject, and it will be a good exercise to sit with your child and check out what they have coming up. The College Prelim examinations, timed for the period 11–20 September (dates to be confirmed), are very important events in a range of ways and do need to be prepared for and taken seriously. In my previous newsletter I informed parents about the requirement for students to be present at each of their examinations and this will be reiterated in subsequent newsletters in Term 3.
In addition to any internals that students may still have to complete in each subject, a feature of the NCEA changes at this level is that, in most of those subjects, students will sit an external assessment that will be run in their classes; it is called a ‘submitted external assessment’. This assessment takes place in most subjects and will run over a limited number of lessons, will be completed online, marked by NZQA markers, and will be completed under ‘tight’ NZQA assessment conditions. Students will be expected to be present for each allocated lesson, they will use their own device, and their result will be made available along with their other examination results in mid-January. Students will also be expected to upload their assessment directly to NZQA after they have completed it, and by no later than Wednesday 30 October, and will do so through their NZQA Login. They will learn how to do this in each subject during Term 3 although the process, once learnt, will be the same regardless of the subject. Each subject will set the time frame for the assessment, and this will show on the Term 3 Assessment Calendar.
In a few subjects such as Art, not surprisingly, there is no end of year examination. Students may instead work for some months on the production of work for a portfolio that is produced at school under the guidance of the teacher but sent away for marking externally. The portfolio is required to be completed by very early in Term 4 and a late submission for any reason whatsoever is not possible – in that way, it is treated just like an examination where a student either sits it at the set time or they don’t.
It’s very relevant at this point to remind you of the ‘one-stop shop’ nature of our Community Portal. Parents can access a lot of information provided by the College about attendance, assessment, and reporting. When you click on the Results tab on the right of the screen, you will be able to access both the Fortnightly Feedback scores and the ‘powerful’ and dynamic NCEA Current Results Summary. This particular document enables you to see the grades that your child gains over the course of the year in their various internal assessments and practice/indicative assessments and their progress towards Level 1 NCEA awards, such as certificate and course/subject endorsement. You no longer have to ask your child to tell you what their assessment results were because you can see them through your own login!
When you click on ‘NCEA Current Results Summary for (your student’s name)’, you will be able to see the subject, standards, credit values and, when results are recorded by teachers, grades gained for those standards.
As the year progresses and internals are completed, it will become very interesting reading that you will not need to ask your teenager to show you – there’ll be no ‘hiding’ from results! The summary table ‘Qualifications Summary’ provides an excellent summary of ‘Achievement/ Merit / Excellence credits’ that are being gained and so shows a student’s progress towards a Merit or an Excellence endorsement.
Students are able to access the same records as you through their own access to the Community Portal. They are therefore able to see their results as they are updated on the Current Results Summary.
In addition to that document, all students have an NZQA Learner Login which is the definitive location for all confirmed results. This is where students will access their final 2024 NCEA results in mid-January 2025 and is accessed through a username and password that are set by the student themselves. My advice to parents is to get the student to show you this so that you are able to see what things students can access in the Login, such as the way to order confirmed Results Notices and a formal copy of the NZQA Record of Achievement.
Through much of Term 2, teachers will be writing mid-year academic reports for all year levels. In those reports, teachers will provide feedback on students’ progress to date and on their achievement levels.
For NCEA subjects, achievement will be described particularly with NCEA grades which will be either final, summative internal assessment results and/or formative external assessment results which have the status of being only ‘indicative’ (obviously not final as those results are gained in the NCEA externals). While being ‘only formative’, such results still provide useful feedback on a student’s progress in meeting the requirements of the external Standard.
It will be common to see in this Report a number of ‘NYA’ indicators (= Not Yet Assessed) for NCEA grades because course work to date has not yet allowed a teacher to properly assess a particular Standard, internal or external.
The College academic reports are made available to you by the coming holidays at the latest through the Community Portal. There, they are found under the ‘Documents’ tab, then ‘Student Reports’.
At this stage of the year, these reports provide a good view of how your student is progressing in terms of their attitude, effort, attendance and NCEA achievement as follows:
Fortnightly Feedback Average
The subject report provides an average score which provides an indication of your student’s attitude and effort in the subject to date. At St Andrew’s, we consider that NCEA academic achievement is not only about academic capability. It is also greatly helped by a student’s attitude towards their learning in the subject and the effort that they put in in, and outside, the class.
Attendance
There is a clear correlation between a student’s attendance in class and the opportunity for high(er) academic achievement. The subject report provides an overall attendance percentage figure to date.
Subject Grades (Estimated/Indicative and Summative Results)
The subject report provides results for assessments in standards that make up the course. At this time of the year, it is not at all unusual to see at least a few ‘NYA’ (Not Yet Assessed) ‘grades’ in the report as there is still a significant amount of course time to go and, therefore, assessment. Teachers are allowed, and are encouraged, to provide an indicative/estimated grade in a standard that indicates how a student is progressing in a standard even if it is not fully assessed at the point of writing. These grades act as feedback on how (well) a student is progressing in the standard and are always subject to change; because there is room for change in a student’s understanding of, and performance in, a standard by the time it is fully completed in an assessment, the estimated grades are merely indicative. On the report, such grades are indicated by an ‘*’. Final summative results for internals do not have the ‘*’.
Teacher Subject Comment
It is our belief that students must develop the skills, dispositions, and characteristics to lead their own learning both at and beyond school. Increasingly, in learning at the College, the key competencies of managing self, thinking, using language, symbols and texts, relating to others, and participating and contributing are taught alongside curriculum content and skills because they provide the students with the means to develop into an effective learner beyond being ‘only’ a student of, for example, French! Therefore, in the report, teachers are asked to comment on the student as a learner, that is, on how well they engage with their learning, how well they understand what they are learning, what strategies they successfully bring into their learning and what a student could do next to further improve as a learner in the subject. It is primarily about teachers providing meaningful feedback on students’ learning.
looking ahead at the next year of study (image currently shows only 2024 courses material):
You might wonder why we require our students to select their courses for the next year so seemingly early on. We do this because it takes us a lot of time to put together our staffing and timetables for the following academic year. It’s not something that we can leave until Christmas time and is what all schools do.
To assist students and their parents in this task, we undertake an ongoing comprehensive information plan and process that runs through the first half of next term. That plan and process generate a new ‘hive of activity’ in students’ minds and in their conversations, particularly as they move higher up through the year groups.
I will provide more information to you about this early next term but do be aware that it’s coming. Students need to think about what they will study next year and will be required to make decisions about that, so it must be good decision-making!
