The New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association / Te Wehengarua (PPTA) suggests an effective way of managing student and teacher assessment workload would be to limit the number of credits offered.

This should take into account the abilities of the class but on average a realistic number of credits to offer would be 13-18 per course, based on assumption of about four hours per week contact time over about 33 weeks, plus some homework time.

18 reasons for 18 credits

1. 5 subjects X 18 credits = 90 = plenty
2. 6 subjects X 18 credits = 108 = heaps!
3. Teachers can teach more and summatively assess less
4. Course endorsement and certificate endorsement can become the priority, ie quality over quantity - this benefits students and – dare we say it – league tables
5. Fewer scheduled assessments means increased opportunities to differentiate programmes of teaching and learning
6. Limiting credits means students have fewer chances to pick and choose what assessments they will opt out of
7. Fewer credits may mean there is more likelihood of being able to offer students a reassessment opportunity
8. Less assessment may provide more time for innovations to teaching and learning programmes
9. Fewer assessments may enable students with challenges to benefit from more teaching time, and for more able students to tackle the excellence criteria
10. Limiting summative assessments across the school may offer more opportunities for cross-subject collaboration
11. Limiting credits helps students manage their assessment load
12. The revised assessment matrices allow for curriculum coverage with 18 credits
13. Limits and helps to manage teachers’ marking loads
14. Less data entry
15. Less paperwork
16. Teachers’ moderation workload is (somewhat) addressed
17. Staff agreeing to a credit maximum should help level the playing field across subjects
18. Helps to manage the workload of the principal’s nominee!

You may also be interested in these 2010 PPTA conference papers:

Building on Excellence: How to make a good schooling system even better

Building on Excellence - summary and conference recommendations

NCEA Internal Assessment: A harder job than professional marking!

NCEA Internal Assessment - summary and conference recommendations

A New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association / Te Wehengarua (PPTA) selection of prescriptions from the Vote Education Budget 2010 briefing papers published on the New Zealand Treasury website.

Vote Education - Prescription excerpts

Treasury has returned to all the policy prescriptions of the 1990s, bulk funding, performance pay, privatization and cost cutting and there is some evidence that the Minister of Finance supports the Treasury education agenda.

In many of the briefing papers there are more sections with deletions than text especially in relation to negotiations.

We are asking the Ombudsman to review some of the restrictions that are justified by a need to “protect the confidentiality of advice given by officials.”

Treasury briefing papers for the 2010 budget