Rage Against the New NECTA Grade Ranges

[Opinion] By Niwa Elisante

As students in secondary schools all over Tanzania are cramming the last of the details for this year’s Certificate of Secondary School Examination (CSSE), they were jolted into alertness by news of a new grade range. For some students, it is possible that they heaved a sigh of relief: gone will be division 0, replaced now by division 5. You don’t have to pretend you did not hear the question when asked about your results: a “five” doesn’t sound anywhere near as bad as a “zero.” To other students, ‘A’s and division ‘1’s must seem very much within reach. Since the A-range has been knocked six notches down, to performance scores above 75%, this times the mandatory seven subjects will give one the coveted Division 1 with 7 points! ‘B’s aren’t that difficult either: get 50% of the exam correct, and you have yourself a ‘B’!

Instead of celebrating, however, the students should contemplate the effects of such changes. They should expect serious grade inflation that would make all grades but ‘A’s meaningless, consequently affecting prospects for further studies and jobs. Yet despite the considerable shortcomings of the new system, and uproar in social media about the dumbing-down of the educated population, the new grade system is opening a national conversation about how national exams are graded. Time to go into the kitchen and see just how the sauce is made.

A Low Bar
What is most disconcerting about the new system is the breadth of the definition “outstanding” for our educational system. With an ‘A’ starting from 75%, what is to distinguish a truly achieved student, who scored far-above average, from the student who is average at best? Given that the results are reported as letter-grades and not as percentage, gone is the difference between a 95% score and a 75%. A bar for excellence set this low makes exceptional performance lost in meaning. It is possible that students that would have fallen into the B-range would now be counted as A-range students, inflating overall performance.

With grade inflation, employers and institutions for higher learning would be at loss when presented with large pools of seemingly outstanding individuals. Given the lack of supplementary measures to one’s performance (such as advanced placement classes and extra-curricula) it will become impossible to identify the real crème de la crème.

Nuanced Mediocrity
Like most people commenting on the online platforms upon the ministry of education announcement, my reaction was of surprise at such cosmetic fixes to a failed education system. Most superficial is the elimination of the division 0. Here, the ministry seems to say that however poorly an individual performs, we must all pretend that they did something. Eliminating the 0 is exemplary of the attempt to create distinction among a large pool of failed students.

Looking at the grade ranges from the bottom-up reveals additional brackets that create marginal differences between the completely-failing and the barely-trying students. An ‘F’ (Fail), which used to range between 0-34%, is now divided into three different grades: in percentages, ‘F’ = 0-19, ‘E’ = 20-29 and ‘D’ = 30-39. But how much more capable is a student with a ‘D’ in the new system, compared to a student with an ‘F’? Is getting a ‘D’ indicative of better learning capacity, or just a way to placate failure by calling it by a more pleasant name? The high level of detail among low-end grades does not magically empower the graduates in the job and higher learning environment. This re-labeling belittles their failure; an act as insulting as it is ludicrous.

So What?
At the core of the new grading system is a question of performance distribution. In the previous system where an ‘A’ = 81-100 and ‘B’ = 61-80, only 40% of the range counted as ‘A’s or ‘B’s. With the new system, 50% of the entire grade range is ‘A’s and ‘B’s. The grade ranges in the new system are skewed to make it easier for students to fall into the ‘high-performing’ category. It is in everyone’s interest to have a nation of high-performing individuals; but good performance should be borne of real effort, not from a lenient set of standards.

Before the announcement, we assumed that the grade ranges used to report national exam results each year were comparable. An ‘A’ in 1999 is equivalent to an ‘A’ in 2004, and it indicates a score of 81% +. It turns out the only year when fixed grade ranges were used was 2012, but in all previous years the range had shifted to accommodate the distribution of the results for that particular year. Therefore, to use the example mentioned, an ‘A’ in 1999 could have been 79% + and in 2004 it could have been 85%+.  A dynamic range like this could be both useful and open to abuse. It could be useful to have a dynamic grading range if it compares individual performance based on the pool of examinees in that year. It allows for the results to be based on the distribution of the grades. Your score would be based on where you fall in the distribution: you have an ‘A’ if you do better than 90% of all examinees, and you have an ‘F’ if you are in the bottom 10%.

But a system like this is potentially open to abuse by political pandering. What is to prevent awarding an ‘A’ to students who are in the top 70th percentile just to create better academic results in an election year? This announcement then, could be a sincere attempt to de-politicize examination results. It starts to reveal what was an opaque assignment of national exams grades. But given the way the problem is approached at the moment, it will turn a secondary certificate from Tanzania into something of a joke.

Featured cover image courtesy of Lloyd B McGuffey 6th Grade Center.