“Scaling has been part of the Education System for the last 20 years ever since the Fiji School Leaving Certificate (1989) and Fiji Seven Form Examination (1979) were introduced. The Ministry’s scaling system is based on sound educational assessment principles used universally in ranking students for selection into tertiary education, scholarships and the like,” said the Permanent Secretary for Education, Dr Brij Lal.
In Fiji, students are given choices in optional subjects to study and they are examined on the particular subject during the external examinations.
With this choice comes the issue of comparability of subjects, where some can be advantaged or disadvantaged by taking the so called ‘easier’ or ‘harder’ subjects.
Similarly, as in other regional countries, not all students study the same subjects, therefore it is not easy to achieve subject equivalence or comparability.
Scaling is brought in to achieve subject equivalence or comparability, based on a set of complex formula which includes an overall mean and overall student deviation.
It is a process which adjusts the results students achieve in their various subjects into a common scale so that students can compete on a fair basis for awards and scholarships and entry to universities or other tertiary institutions.
“The Ministry of Education is aware that it is not always easy to understand how scaling works and hopefully the following illustration will help everyone understand the need for scaling before awards and scholarships are awarded to recipients,” said Dr Brij Lal.
Imagine 10 tourists coming to Fiji from Australia, New Zealand, USA and each one of them buying Fiji dollar of about a 100 of their countries currency.
The Fiji dollar in this context becomes the common scale to measure the value and strength of each tourist’s $100 denomination.
Scaling is a complex but necessary process. According to experts in the field of educational assessment, scaling is the fairest process since it enables students to study the subjects they want and allow teachers to develop their own teaching and assessment programme suited to their students’ needs and still enable the tertiary institutions to compare students who undertake different study programme.
Our scaling is applied equally to all students, regardless of gender, ethnicity and religion, and is done in conditions of anonymity.
If un-scaled marks are used for selection processes, then the Ministry of Education would be most unfair to students because of the issue of comparability between subjects.
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