By Pesi Fonua

Calling the introduction of Raw Marks “a National Crisis”, Tonga’s Exams and Assessment Unit (EAU) has made three recommendations and alerted the Ministry of Education that consultations with all its divisions and stakeholders are vital.

The recommendations, which include dumping “the very expensive…unreliable software of Piveni’s,” are contained in an internal report that aimed to provoke discussion within the Ministry of Education on multiple issues that the EAU is concerned about.

In March the EAU presented the report to government expressing its frustration over stagnation within the Ministry and the difficulties encountered in its attempts to introduce a new curriculum, and to complete a transition from Standardized Marks to Raw Marks or “outcome-based assessment”.

The EAU admitted that the Ministry’s initiative to introduce the outcome-based curriculum in 2016 has put schools and EAU into a mad-rush. Meanwhile, the Ministry was preoccupied with its initiative to introduce the outcome-based curriculum, at the expense of teachers’ capacity-building and students’ adaptations.

Because of the 2015 Raw Marks examination results, Form Seven students could not enter universities in New Zealand, Australia and further abroad. Most, if not all, of the 2015 Form Seven and Form Six students are retained in Tonga, it stated.

Many students have to repeat Forms 5-6-7 due to the raw marks. A very low number of students passed the end of the year exam last year. Only 19% passed the Tonga School Certificate exam, 42% passed the Tonga Form Seven School Certificate, and 48% passed the Tonga National Form Six Certificate. Very low pass rates were also recorded in Forms 5 and 6.

The EAU also pointed out that by introducing the new curriculum, the EAU costs are likely to be tripled. The cost of EAU activities in the past was about TOP$70,000.

“Is the Ministry ready to finance all the extra costs that the reformed curriculum imposes?” the report asked.

Incorrect results

The EAU also expressed their dislike of Piveni Piukala’s software. “This software is unreliable as a lot of the results were manually checked and they do not match the rest of the correct ones. The results generated by this software are inconsistent. It also requires manual entering and processing of data not automated as the TITAN program.”

The EAU stated that Piveni’s “quick fix” software is nowhere comparable to the free and accredited ATLAS program of EQAP (Suva), which could generate more accurate results and has a history of what was entered correctly or incorrectly in to the system.

The report expressed concern that for 2015 “a lot of the results reported so far may be incorrect.”

Recommendations

The Exams and Assessment Unit recommendations are:

1.    “Tonga continues to use the current prescription (delayed two months now) while we continue to amend/change/unpack the current syllabus and start the professional development for the new syllabus this year to be trialed next year.

2.    Use only ATLAS program of EQAP (which is free and recognized) on our raw marks and not resort back to the very expensive, need a lot of upgrade and unreliable software of Piveni’s.

3.    Work with EQAP on the accreditations of our Raw marks, talk with New Zealand and Australia about our way forward in accreditation of our new raw mark qualification as this is a National Crisis.”