What!? Time for another rant already? NCEA sucks

NCEA sucks. If ur an NCEA noob, NCEA stands for National Certificate of Educational Achievement. In every subject, the topics that you study are called 'Achievement Standards'. Each Achievement standard (AS) is worth a certain amount of credits, usually ranging from 2-4 credits each, but you can get the odd achievement standard that is worth 5 or 6 credits. When you do a test for an AS, you are given a final mark for that AS which can be either Not Achieved(this is the fail grade), Achievement(Achievement or beyond is a 'pass the AS grade'), Achievement with Merit or Achievement with Excellence. No matter what grade you get as long as it is a passing grade, you still get the same number of credits. For example someone with Excellence will still get the same number of credits as someone who Achieved.

Now, something i dont get about the grades is why dont they just give you a (0 being not achieved)0, 1, 2 or 3(3 being Excellence) rather than introducing gimicky names for these grades like Achievement, etc.. with all this crap going on, you might as well invent some of ur own grades like Achievement with Awesomeness or Achievement with Distinction or Achievement with Brilliance or Achievement with Utter Nonsense. It's probably true that NCEA likes to say what people with each grade can do. For example in many ASs, the criteria for Achieved is often 'Describe', Merit is often 'Explain' and Excellence is often 'Discuss'. However NCEA tests never account for the fact that if you had one more night to finish your work, you might have been able to 'Discuss' your topic, rather than 'Explain' it, and therefore achieve with Excellence. Or when you do an NCEA test. Lets say you screwed the test up with one little mistake and thus got Not Achieved, but you know that if you could sit that test just one more time again, you would be able to get Excellence. In fact that nearly happened to me once. In a Level 2 physics internal, i was going to get Not achieved because i wrote a right answer, scribbled it out, then wrote a wrong answer right next to it. This little error was enough to make me fail the whole test, but since the teachers felt sorry for me, they gave me one more chance to correct my error (which I sucessfully did) and so got Excellence. But I can't help wondering how many other people have actually been screwed over by this 'one mistake, fail the whole test' thing. This is yet another reason why NCEA SUCKS BIG `#$@!^ %&^* *&(^($#@. Also not to mention that fact that if u fail an AS, you get shit-all for doing it. In other words, if you spent a whole weekend of your precious spare time finishing an NCEA Achievement Standard, and you failed it just because of some technicality(e.g. indented paragraphs rather than leaving spaces between ur paragraphs) then you get absolutely nothing for it. No recognition for trying to do it at ALL!!! Just like getting a 0% mark for it. But if your worried that ur spend ages working on an internal and fail it, then there’s a solution that someone I know did(AND IM NOT GOING TO SAY NAMES). For a physics internal, they just copied and pasted information off the internet for their work, then just gave a different web site as their reference so none of the markers/moderators could tell. Now believe it or not, they got a Merit. Which would be exactly the same as someone who spent their whole weekend trying to get Excellence, and got a Merit instead because their work wasn’t quite up to an excellence ‘standard’. Percentage marks are better because they give a much fairer, more detailed and clearer, indication of the persons abilities.

However, a problem that I have with all grading systems, not only NCEA, but Bursary, School certificate, Sixth form certificate etc., is that they intentionally discrimate against dumb people. I mean, if you were someone really dumb, how would you like it if someone came and rubbed it in your face that you are the dumbest person in your class, or possibly the whole school... (dumb sounds a too harsher word so i will say 'not smart')... if you weren't smart, you probably would have left school at an early age because you can not stand this grading discrimination crap being rubbed in ur face that everyone else is better than you... So what is this world coming to?. First, we discriminated women, then we discovered black skinned people so we discriminated black skinned people too. And now with all these fundamentlist hard-core Islamic terrorists around, we start suspecting every Islamic person to be a terrorist, thus discriminating peace-loving Islams as well. And, now, we have moved on to 'dumb' people: people who just aren't good at learning things. Is this fair? NO! So in these grading systems that every school around the world is guilty of using, every school is guilty of discrimination against these sorts of people, and so are 100% guilty of Human Rights violations.