Queensland schools set to dump OP score system by 2017

THE education minister has defended plans to dump the controversial OP scoring system, saying it is no longer relevant.

JOHN-Paul Langbroek has defended plans to dump Overall Position (OP) rankings in Queensland secondary schools, saying the model was unpopular and outdated.

The Education Minister said he didn’t expect many stakeholders in the education system would oppose an overhaul, which was recommended by the Australian Council for Educational Research following a review.

The current OP system ranks schools based on students’ collective results in the Queensland Core Skills test, with individual students ranked on their internal school results.

Mr Langroek said the system had become irrelevant because of the vast number of ways in which students can now be accepted into universities.

“Very few people… have argued for our current system to stay as it is without any change at all,” Mr Langbroek told ABC radio.

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“Most people agree that with the changes we’ve seen in education, both at the higher level, the universities, where we have a demand-driven system… there are very few students who don’t get to uni if they want to by one path or another.

“It can be by doing a certificate or a diploma, or having a bridging course.

“Our current system of OP, which was really just a list of your tertiary entrance qualifications, is not really relevant because not all students are using it to get to uni.”

Mr Langbroek said school-based assessment had been used in Queensland since 1972, while the OP system had been in place for the last 20 years.

Under a new model recommended in the ACEA report, students would be ranked based on three internal pieces of assessment and one external assessment.

Marks would potentially be ranked using a similar system to other states, under which students receive a rank from 0-99.95, with their final figure used to determine tertiary qualifications.

The restructure would open to stakeholder input and would be trialled and tested over the next two years, before being implemented in 2017.

Students entering Year 9 in 2015 would be the first class of Queensland students to be tested under the new system once they had reached senior school.

“We want to make sure that we keep working with teachers, unions, parents, principals, groups , to make sure that the system we comes up with ends up being fair, transparent and efficient,” Mr Langbroek said.

“We’ve got such a complex system – we’ve got Levels of Achievement, QCS Test grades, SAIs, QCS distribution parameters, OAIs, OPs… QCS Test Percentiles and QTAC selection ranks.

“We think it should obviously be simplified to make it fair, transparent and efficient, so that we’ve got the best system for the 21st century.”

At present, a majority of Queensland students who want to enter university sit a seven-hour core skills test which examines 49 core curriculum elements and is used in conjunction with a senior student’s subject results to help decide an OP ranking between one and 25.