Grade 11 selections underway in Port Moresby

SECONDARY school principals are in Port Moresby to begin the selection of students for Grade 11 next year.
Of the 53,413 Grade 10 students registered with the Measurement Services Branch that were to sit for the national examinations this year, only 48,790 answer sheets were received.
Branch assistant director Mary Philips yesterday encouraged principals to send the required information to the branch on time to avoid delays in the selections.
She announced that next year, the Grade 10 examination might be reduced to a week.
“This is because we have observed in the past years that exam papers have been sitting in schools for too long,” she said. “There are indications of cheating where students who score very low marks in the first week seem to score very high marks in the second week of examinations. 
“It is cost effective and we can have difficult subjects in the morning and the easy subjects during the afternoon.”
Data analyst Malachai Nathaniel said statistics showed that since 2011, the number of students scoring A and B had been decreasing while students scoring C, D and E had increased.
He said it would be interesting to see the results this year.
Nathaniel said the branch could easily tell when a student or a school was cheating.
Meanwhile, Jubilee Secondary School principal Bernadette Ove said Grade 12 exam papers contained a lot of errors.
She said exam questions were disqualified because the markers themselves could not understand the questions. 
She suggested that Grade 12 exam questions be written by teachers themselves and not university lecturers