The organisation supplied the evaluation team with broad figures claiming achievement rates of approximately 80 per cent for the NZIM Diploma in Management courses….NZQA saw no reliable evidence to support the claimed achievement rate.

Students who do not meet minimum entry criteria are being admitted to the programme, and therefore their needs are not being met.

Assignments lacked marking guides and it was unclear why and how marks were allocated for answers. No written feedback is given to learners.

There is a heavy reliance on one person for maintaining academic integrity and, without good systems in place, this task is too large.

While those quotes are all poor, some parts of the organisation worked well, such as providing facilities. The underlying problem seems to be rapid growth and a lack of academic systems.

Looking at this story, I wouldn’t describe the place as dodgy, based on the NZQA report, just very badly managed. The line may be small, but they seem to be requiring students to turn up and they’re apparently not passing them all regardless of performance. Unfortunately, the College doesn’t seem to focus nearly enough on entry, teacher quality, assessment, moderation and student outcomes. The students aren’t unhappy, but that may well stem from the promise that a qualification from the College is key to future work and residence in NZ. Apparently NZQA has ordered the College not to take any more enrolments, which is a good step, but may well hasten the College’s demise, especially if combined with an informal Immigration NZ ban on new visas.

Last week, I was in contact with Feroz Ali, CE of NZ Career College, so I asked him about his thoughts on this. He said, “It has merit but lacks operational thought and consultation. …It eliminates cowboys and overnight one year success Providers. Already we have seen them panic which is good.” He thought PTE numbers would drop in the short term but would then rally back.

What’s your view on the impact of these changes? Where will the impact be felt most and are there industry-specific effects?

• Best Policy The release of performance data on tertiary education organisations wins hands down. We can all find reasons why the data isn’t perfect but it makes it pretty hard to hide a decision to run a lot of rubbish courses and it shifts funding towards results, rather than enrolments. It will change the tertiary landscape.
• Worst Policy Interest-free loans continues to be a major drain on taxpayers and diverts tertiary education investment unnecessarily. If we even adjusted loans for inflation we would save hundreds of millions of dollars and it would have no or minimal effect on access. Luckily for other policy-makers and lobbyists, their policy is unlikely to displace free loans as worst policy of the year for the foreseeable future
• Best News Story Well, it had to be the husband asking the MOE to do something about his wife sleeping with a Brazilian homestay student. Blogging gold that one was.
• Best Regulatory Response I’ll give a joint award to NZQA and Immigration NZ for finally pulling finger and doing something about those bottom-feeding providers, mainly in Auckland, that exploit international students and/or NZ by poor education, visa fraud and cheating. It took them long enough, but they have been firm on a few places and it is great to see. There is more to do in 2011.
• Best TEO initiative The work on commercialisation that both the Metro ITPs and the universities did was great, both in websites and other work. There is much more to go in terms of actions and results, but they did something very positive and it deserves to be recognised. Many TEOs did other good things, but these were substantive efforts to address a largely unserved need.
• Best Use of Social Media I can’t go past Jason Nockels’ work up at UCOL. He’s built up a following of 3,700 fans on Facebook and he and the team are still working on new ideas.
• Ministerial Assessment Well, I liked Steven Joyce’s work this year and since I wrote about his appointment in my second post of the year, I’ve covered all of his time in the role. He hasn’t presented an awe-inspiring vision for the sector but he’s pushed through some important issues , (like performance reporting and performance funding), appointed a strong chair to TEC, encouraged NZQA in its review of quals (Anne Tolley started that), approved sensible TEI mergers and generally done a very effective job. He gets 8/10.
• Opposition Assessment Grant Robertson picked up Labour’s tertiary education role in June and he’s been reasonably effective over that time. He stepped away from Maryan Street’s focus on ACE and has spent more time on issues like caps and student support changes (these became bigger after the May budget too). He hasn’t landed any blows on Joyce and I think that’s partly because it is a big hurdle to take over a new portfolio, but also because it is hard to get traction essentially pushing for more spending when the deficit is so high. He gets 5/10. He’ll improve next year as he’s very capable, but tertiary education won’t be an election issue unless National puts loans on the table, so you may hear more of him in his other (or new) portfolios. (In terms of the Greens, I’d give them 2-3/10 for being there, but they made no impact.)
• CEs in the Media The straight talking to the universities and the TEU about why graduate outcomes matter by Unitec’s Rick Ede was great. On the other hand it would have been good to hear more from Massey’s Steve Maharey on campus/course closures and the cleaning staff dispute.
• Worst Last Minute Document Drop This one goes to NZQA, which released its detailed guidelines for L1-6 qualification approval late on 21 December, two days after their last newsletter of the year! I’m sure you’ll all read that on the beach…

By the way, we didn’t trawl through every blog post, shortlist finalists and invite in neutral judges to help in the decision. Marina and I spent a few minutes chatting at the end of a cafe meeting (yup, that’s what consultants do all day), so feel free to add your own take on the year below!

This post will probably be the last until the 10th of January, unless something really exciting comes up. If it’s just exciting, I’ll pop something on Facebook or Twitter – sign up on the site, top right. And if your media team just put out a puff piece to get some easy coverage in the news dead period, I’ll get back to reading my book.