In my experience, NCEA is a punitive box ticking system, particularly when for students who would traditionally be considered to be in the generally high performing tiers, but may for whatever reason be prone to either occasional clumsy mistakes, or be good at everything except some relarively minor skills (that are accordingly listed in the lowest tier requirements)
Consider this example:
Let's say you have this student who is one of the only ones in his year who can consistently manage to find his way through a complex hedge maze, and actually happens to be the fastest at doing so. This corresponds to your "Excellence" Tier, and under real world conditions or traditional examination rubics, would be allocated a giant share of the importance/value points.
However, let's say that this student happens to be bad at tying his shoe laces. In fact, he somewhat hates the task. (And never mind the fact that the real world has long actually moved to introduce lace-less shoes for practical daily usage either). Uh oh. Under NCEA, tying your shoe laces cleanly and tidly according to the method prescribed by national standards is one of the 3 requirements for "Achieved" status (i.e. the lowest rung for a pass mark for the course). Never fear, as long as he made no other basic errors, and did everything right in the higher levels (e.g. can run 500m in the prescribed time for "Merit", in addition to the Excellence task before) we can just "borrow" that missing points (and each of those higher tier ticks will still only be worth one tick instead of 50 or 25 in traditionally systems), meaning the student can still successfully pass the "Achieved" band. However, since we borrowed a point to make this happen, they can now only get Merit. Meh, maybe a small penalty is fair in this case for making mistakes...
Ok, now let's say that that day, this student happened to make one other clumsy mistake (e.g. letting go of a stretch slightly too early, or holding the pose with one arm instead of two as they were swatting away a mosquito with the other hand). Well, now we're at 2/3 "Achieved" band requirements FAILED, meaning they technically failed the whole thing! But look, you can resit the thing to have another chance at passing. After all, the school doesn't want too many of the cabbage class students failing either, as it hurts their metrics, hence they will run at least one resit session.
But, oh yeah, in the resit, you can only get a chance to get "Achieved", and that's even if you do all this basic things right this time, and despite having previously and consistently demonstrated above average completion of the higher skills. So all of a sudden, a small mistake on a minor scoring point at the basic tier has suddenly made our student go from the high performer band into ordinary pesant/cabbage band, and end up being someone who may not even pass (if they again stuff up)
Do this enough times, and you get dropped from the top streams, while anyone looking back at achievement records without context will be none the wiser - only seeing that the student looked to have barely managed to clear first gear, when in fact, they had been hobbled into only getting first gear grades by the system.
Contrast this with traditional exam grading, or how real world works:
* People who can do hard / complex / rare thing get rewarded generously, as everyone rightfully acknowledges that this deserves more points for pulling off successfully.
* Minor / basic skills are worth proportionally less.
* Any slip ups on these minor points then only get subtracted from total combined grade accumulated from everything you got right, instead of precluding possibility of being assessed on them at all.
* So, clumsy genius / specialist at hard stuff can still get a chance to shine (or at least bulk up their total score) in the areas they excel at, instead of being defined by what they "cannot" do
Thus, NCEA allows for less holistic assessment of an individual's true skills, instead leaning more heavily towards being a system for disproportionate punitive judgement over "basic" errors.
Thus the point of contention then becomes, why do the powers that be still value some of these "basic tier" requirements - some of which may be part their use-by date in practical real world terms?
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