Quick and Dirty Guide to NCEA

The NCEA is made of two types of standards - Unit Standards and Achievement Standards. The difference between them isn’t really very important (basically, a Unit Standard is either Achieved or Not Achieved, while in an Achievement Standard you can also get Merit or Excellence if you do well). A standard is made up of a list of things - called elements - you can do. If you show that you can do all of the things listed in the standard, then you have achieved it.

Now, each of these standards has two very important numbers associated with it:

1) The level. The level represents how hard the standard is. Level 1 is Year 11/Fifth form hard. Level 3 is Year 13/Seventh form hard. The whole system - called the National Qualifications Framework - actually goes up to level 10, which is PhD hard. Only levels 1-3 are part of NCEA. Level 4 is Scholarship.

2) Credits. Credits represent - roughly - the amount of work involved in learning a standard. Every credit is supposed to represent about 10 hours of work. For 1 high school subject, you would normally do 24 credits in a year. A 1 year course is 120 credits. Or about that, anyway.

NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) is a qualification. Just like unit and achievement standards, qualifications are part of the National Qualifications Framework. The NCEA is available in 3 different flavours - NCEA Level 1, NCEA Level 2, and NCEA Level 3. The levels are just the same as the levels for unit and achievement standards and show how hard they are.

To get the NCEA you need to get 80 credits, at least 60 of which need to be at the same level as the flavour of NCEA you’re trying to get.

Now the slightly harder part - The Common Entrance Standard. The Common Entrance Standard is the requirements that the New Zealand Vice Chancellors Committee (NZVCC) agreed on for University Entrance. It’s based, pretty roughly, on what you had to do to get into university under Bursary, and has 3 parts.

1) The Academic Requirement. For the academic requirement you need to get 42 credits at level 3. These are taken any 4 subjects on the Approved Subjects List (the Approved Subjects List being, redundantly enough, the list of subjects that can be used for University Entrance). Of these 4 Subjects, you need to get 14 credits each in 2 subjects, and the remaining 14 can be made up by adding your last 2 subjects together.

2) The Numeracy Requirement. This says that you have to get at least 14 credits in level 1 maths.

3) The Literacy Requirement. This say that you need to get at least 8 credits in level 2 English or Maori. Of those 4 credits, at least 4 of them must be in reading and 4 of them must be in writing. There is a list of standards that can be used for the reading and writing parts of the literacy standard.

And for those of you who were wondering, this system is here to stay. It's been gradually introduced since the NZQA were set up in about 1990, based of provisions of the Adeucation Act 1989. Both Labour and National have both had a big hand in its development. While they both might like you to believe otherwise, they're only squabbling over the details.

- Hewligan