Government’s Tonga High School (THS) has been told to name a dux for this year’s prize giving awards, Tonga’s Acting Minister of Education Dr ‘Aisake Eke has told Kaniva News this morning.
Dr Eke was responding after it was revealed last week on media the school would not have a dux for the year 2015 because of a problem they attributed to the introduction of a new system of measurement to measure students’ performance.
THS officials said they fear that calculating who should become dux of the school using the new system would cause a problem because students’ marks were a result of an assessment previously assessed through the old system.
However a meeting with Dr Eke last week the THS officials agreed they will have a dux for the prize giving awards.
The new system for marking of students’ marks was introduced by the Prime Minister Hon ‘Akilisi Pohiva in his role as Minister of Education in what he believed to be the solution to a recently released report which showed that exam pass rates had declined dramatically.
Hon. Pohiva, a former government teacher and lecturer at Tonga’s Teachers Training College now known as Tonga Institute of Education, said one of the problems that contributed to the decline was the use of standardisation of results to improve students’ final marks.
This meant primary school students who failed the Secondary Entrance Examination (SEE), particularly in English and Mathematics, could still get into high school, but were ill prepared to cope with work at a higher level.
The scaling of entrance exam results had misled the public about student performance, the PM’s Office said in a press release obtained by Kaniva News last month.
Hon Pohiva wanted schools in Tonga to use raw marks when calculating students’ exam results and agreed a computer software by Tongan computer programmer expert Piveni Piukala be used for the new system.
The Prime Minister’s Office said a report was released on September 8 in which Hon. Pohiva pointed why students had performed poorly in the last decade.
The report
The report analysing the quality of education in Tonga showed that the rate of students passing their exams had been declining over the past decade, the Prime Minister’s Office said.
According to the report, the pass rate of students sitting for English and Mathematics in SEE in the period 2002–2014 was consistently about 30% or lower.
It said this level of performance was disappointingly low and nothing had been done to improve the situation, despite efforts to reform the education system.
In 2002, 23% of the students who sat for English passed. This pass rate dropped to 20% in 2014. In Mathematics, only 17% passed in 2014, a drop of 14 percent from 31% in 2002.
There was also a clear indication that the number of students passing popular subjects like Tongan Studies and Environmental Science with 50% raw marks or better had also declined.
Since taking office in January, Hon. Pohiva has attempted to find a solution to fix the declining trends of students’ performance.
The Prime Minister’s office said the public did not know how badly students had done because of the standardisation process and the way the results were reported.
“The scaling of results has misled the public about student performance against prescribed learning outcomes, thus allowing students to enter secondary school ill prepared.
“It infers that the scaling process has allowed students who actually failed in Mathematics and English to move on to secondary school alongside those who had passed legitimately.”
