I heard an interview the other day about NCEA, how schools were increasingly losing faith in this qualifications system and increasingly paying to bring in the Cambridge examination system based on external standards, i.e. able to measure objectively one student’s performance against others of the same age in the wider population (… basically the system we used to have that was thrown out at great expense). Although I’m not an expert in this area, my understanding is that the changes resulted in large measure from beliefs that competition was simply another male evil that should largely be removed from education and replaced by a warmer, fuzzier, “standards” system complying better with feminist ideas. Science, statistics and objective grading of performance were seen as male ideology and therefore undesirable, by an education system that had already squeezed out most men. NCEA stands as another failure resulting from feminist ideology.