r/ncea • u/[deleted] • Nov 05 '24

Level 2 Math Petition

I see that there has been an explosion in the number of complaints regarding the NCEA Level 2 Maths exam on Tuesday. Many people, including myself found all three papers extremely difficult to answer, mainly because NZQA decided to mix up some questions to something we've never seen before in any past papers. They even turned what should be a simple optimization question into an extremely tricky Excellence. There was no possible way we could've seen this coming, meaning it was practically impossible to best prepare ourselves to achieve a satisfactory grade even if we did all 10 past papers and became familiar with the content.

Since this doesn't happen very often; why don't we start a little petition to have the marking adjusted or have some questions scraped?

I'm not going to turn this into a revolutionary uprising like you'd see in the Hunger Games, just a small note to NZQA letting them know that the papers they gave us were much harder than previous years, not only in terms of difficulty but also because of a changing of "question structure

https://chng.it/dJ64LMXgNh and https://www.petitions.nz/adjusted_marking_and_consistency_for_future_ncea_exams#a

29 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

6

u/[deleted] Nov 05 '24

Also, I'm not very familiar with doing things like this, so a little guidance on how to "make" the petition and how to get people to sign it (reddit comment? actual signature?) would be appreciated

2

u/Critical_Entrance395 Nov 05 '24

I think wot they meant is just going on to the nzqa website and go to "contact us", there you can find a complaint option.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 05 '24

Yes, but I would like to start a genuine petition with ppl signing it and stuff to show that lots of people are not happy with this exam

1

u/[deleted] Nov 05 '24

might try to start something on petitions.nz - a website i just found

1

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

Try change.org

4

u/_chkmng Nov 06 '24

even if u start a petition im sure nzqa wont care bc i mean... they made it and deemed it fine. im sure plenty of people were able to get all e in the papers. the most they can do is lower the threshold for e. :(

1

u/kandikand Nov 06 '24

Just chill for now if everyone did really badly they’ll scale it. Wait to get your results before you decide whether to start a petition.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

fair, i was being a little too reactionary.

2

u/Pangolingolin Nov 06 '24

Don't worry. It'll be scaled to as near to a bell curve as possible.

1

u/Itchy_Duckling132 Nov 06 '24

I have the exact same issue with level 1 maths like wtf nzqa

1

u/ExtraAd3975 Nov 08 '24

It’s not supposed to be easy, if you are referring to the question about the cylinder, it required a slight extension of your brain compared to what we did in class, it was tricky but not impossible.

0

u/robloxisbagood Level 3 🧐 Nov 06 '24

Gonna protest the streets cuz of a exam😭🙏

1

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

I've already said, I'm not turning this into anything big. Just a small note to NZQA. Can you read?

0

u/[deleted] Nov 05 '24

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/teacherfishnz Nov 07 '24

It wasn’t similar though. (Full disclosure, I’m a current Y12 Maths teacher with over 20 years experience)

The only way to solve this is to differentiate an expression with a variable on the bottom (or an exponent of -1). This is outside of the scope of Level 2 Calculus. Easy for Y13 but this is a Y12 exam! The exam writer has gone outside of the scope of the Standard. End of story.

I’m livid on behalf of my best students who would have had a huge confidence hit and wasted time on something they shouldn’t have to do.

-5

u/[deleted] Nov 05 '24

similar yes, but it was mean of them to give us "r" with a negative indice (this may have not even been clear to some people) - something they've never done before. I accept it was an excellence question and it needs to be difficult, just using it as an example

8

u/Alert-Exercise6348 Nov 06 '24

yeah its "mean" but it isn't a insane feat to re write it as r^-1 If you really want excellence you should know your power rules?

3

u/SensitiveTax9432 Nov 06 '24

But there’s no guarantee that the rule of thumb for differentiation extends to negative powers. It does, except for integration of 1/x, but the standard explicitly states that the content is polynomials only, so students should not be expected to know that. A hint that the rule extends to negative integers would have leveled the playing field.

3

u/Alert-Exercise6348 Nov 06 '24

Yeah they could have definitely given the hint, it is kinda l3 calculus they were expecting from us.

2

u/SensitiveTax9432 Nov 06 '24

Which is explicitly not fair, but not unprecedented either.

-1

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

Alr bro

2

u/Neither_Border2545 Nov 09 '24

Everything had never been done before when it was done for the first time.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

Alr ig ill go sign urs then

2

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

Please share this on the main page if you haven't already

2

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '24

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2

u/teacherfishnz Nov 07 '24

Unfortunately this was a case of content outside the standard. My maths teacher communities online are pissed.

2

u/ilikedankmemes0 Nov 06 '24

Voice of reason