To Icarus and others - The Political Science strand at UPNG is in the process of tapping into the existing concern and willingness to help among prominent Papua New Guineans who have been students and staff.

An Advisory Committee of 6-7 people is being formed to draw upon their expertise and influence as part of the rebuilding of one of the major academic programmes at UPNG.

Anyone interested in assisting either with the Committee or in some other way can contact me, the incoming Professor of Political Science, on the e-mail address provided here.

The Australian Government is currently conducting a Review of its Overseas Aid Programme.

A submission urging that the rebuilding of UPNG be given top priority by AusAID, within its current emphasis upon education in PNG, is being prepared for despatch to the Review panel.

Anyone who would like to make a submission can do so on www.aidreview.gov.au.

UPNG can do with all the assistance that supportive submissions can provide.

I would like to point out that the heading: 'National Disgrace: UPNG in a parlous state' was not mine, even though the attribution below 'by Scott MacWilliam' would seem to suggest otherwise.

The correct title for my two-part essay is rather different and less belligerent, and appears at the bottom of the excerpt which is in PNG Attitude as 'Two visions, outcome uncertain - the University of Papua New Guinea’.

Of particular relevance to the distinction between headings is my point in the second part of the essay, that UPNG's current state is not solely determined by PNG governments.

International donors who have directed funds everywhere but to UPNG and international advisors who have urged balanced national budgets and the priority of primary education, as if the three levels of education are somehow separable, are also responsible.

Marilyn & M Kila - Vic reminds us that the development of certain skills for OBE outcomes should not interfere with the teaching of the knowledge component of a program at any grade level.

Going back to my original examples - it may be good to get the students to do research into AIDS and HIV so they can learn something about the human body and germs but they also need to be taught basic Biology at the same time, i.e., human anatomy, the reproductive system, microbiology, etc They also need to be taught morality.

It is good to teach students how to grow and cook nutritious food but they also need to to be taught subjects like Nutrition, Causes of Malnutrition, the Digestive System, Child Care, etc.

PNG teachers today may not be teaching the basic subjects of English, Mathematics, Science and Social Science. These must not be neglected while the OBE assignments are done by the children and their parents.

The pupils are probably having trouble trying to do the OBE research assignments due to lack of resources. Apart from OBE work, they also need to have the basics drilled into them.

The basics, especially in English and Maths, need constant exercises and the areas which they don't understand have to be ascertained and the teacher then has to work out the appropriate exercises to help the pupils to overcome the deficiencies in their understanding and skills.

As far as I know the new OBE Syllabus in PNG has only been introduced up to Year 10 level so far. Vic and Bev were teaching Years 11 and 12.

Marilyn - Your concerns about the impact of Outcome-Based Education on student assessment may be valid at the primary and elementary levels of schooling but it was not a factor in the determination of student marks at the Grade 12 level as this educational philosophy had not been implemented at the senior high school level.

No, we cannot put blame on OBE for the inflation of student marks in high school because research and other types of projects were not part of the work students were expected to complete.

I must point out that I am excluding the practical work that was part of the science syllabus from my comments on OBE as this always was and remains part of the expectations of course work in chemistry, biology and physics, long before OBE.

What in fact we did find was that the practice of inflating marks was a well established routine teachers relied on as a way to meet the mark distribution expected on a bell shaped curve.

This curve prescribes the relative number of A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s that one would expect in a population of students enrolled in a course.

Such adjustments would not be a concern if they were only a few points upwards but we found them to be multiples of ten points upward in most cases.

This extreme inflation of marks shifts emphasis away from the scope of what students learned and downplays the teacher’s professional obligations and responsibility for student learning.

What students are learning no longer really matters because their mark can be adjusted to make it appear that they are doing well. Teachers used this as a way to mask their own shortcomings as effective teachers or to overcome any other system failures that factored into student learning.

And, again, I emphasise, OBE was not one of those system failures at the senior high school level.

As a result, even though students are not acquiring the knowledge or the skills that they should have at each grade level they are pushed along through the system, unable to meet the expectations in each successive grade all the way up without some remediation or a lowering of standards and expectations further up the grade ladder.

It becomes a self-defeating system promoting mediocrity instead of acceptable and expected standards as set out in the original programs.

So, who is to blame here? I put the blame on the poor training teachers get before they go out into the schools and lack of professional upgrading available to many teachers once they are in the classroom.

There are also too many teachers who do not deliver on their professional obligations; i.e., they view teaching simply as a job devoid of the moral and ethical responsibilities bestowed upon them once they chose to become teachers.

And, finally the lack of adequate supervision by inspectors is another problem and part of the system failure as we saw it. There are too many people that are not doing a good job or fail to do their job at all in the system.

As for Outcome-Based Education, it goes beyond the knowledge bounds specified in the old system by identifying what skills, and attitudes students should also acquire at the end of each grade. It does not or should not prescribe the pedagogy that teachers are to employ in student acquisition of knowledge or the development of the skills and attitudes.

At least here in our system in Canada that is the case. It may provide examples of how certain concepts could be taught or how certain skills or attitudes could be developed but these are not prescriptive.

The skills that students are expected to develop would include literacy skills, reading, writing, and comprehension, inquiry skills, questioning, analyzing, synthesizing, researching, etc. all of which were skills developed in the old system one way or another but often more haphazardly.
Assessment of these, if done, was more informal.

Now, these are to be formally assessed with the OBE approach. Research skills obviously require resources. If these are lacking, then such skills are not developed and you, as a teacher would know.

Development of certain skills, however, should not interfere with the teaching of the knowledge component of a program at any grade level.

So placing blame on OBE for the lack of learning that appears to have occurred in the primary and elementary grades is not a true picture of what is going on.

OBE has become the scapegoat for other problems in the system. That takes us back to our original report on the “Obstacles to Student Success in PNG”.

This report by Scot MacWilliams is not very surprising.

It is merely stating the obvious. But by an outsider - it really hurts.

It should rightly put every PNGean to shame from PM Somare right down to the villager in Rural PNG.

It is not only the UPNG. This sad state of affairs is widely prevalent in the majority of our state institutions.

The parlous state of UPNG also clearly reflects the whole sorry state of PNG.

It also tells many overseas observers at the way our national affairs have been grossly mis-managed by successive administrations since Independence.

The current government and parliament won't fix this in the two years it has to the next polls.

The task is now up to the next political regime after 2012 national general elections.

Let us hope and pray that PNG gets a very good Prime Minister to lead the country to the next level in this new millinium.

Thanks, Barbara. Yes the problem spreads across the whole education spectrum. At UPNG we had a major issue with prospective students presenting fake secondary school reports when applying for admission. In fact we had a staff section dedicated to checking this.

This report is in today's National -

http://www.thenational.com.pg/?q=node/15167

There have also been widespread report of some schools falsifying students grades.

From personal experience, the neglected state of UPNG is sadly the result of years of neglect and underfunding.

The aircon in the Michael Somare library has not been working for more than 15 years - there is no maintenance money to repair it. This is a building with no opening windows and only two narrow escape routes for possibly hundreds of people in the event of a fire.

The New Guinea Collection - of world-wide importance as a Pacific archive - is slowly deteriorating due to lack of appropriate climate control. I used to watch in despair as every morning I would see a new pool of black goo on the floor which was the melted remains of an important 16 mm movie or slide file archive. Important and valuable art works were being stolen due to lack of security.

I approached government authorities, private donors and Telecom with a comprehensive proposal for a national education broadband network six years ago as part of a national PNG governance research initiative, but had no success.

So while the campus computer network is pretty good, the external links to the internet for the whole university are less than I can get with an individual broadband link from Telstra.

UPNG even finds it difficult to meet its obligations for staff entitlements (sometimes they had to go into debt to pay monthly staff salaries), and lives a hand-to-mouth existence. Goroka and Lae public tertiary institutions are in an even worse state.

I spoke to AusAID about increased support - but they were diverting resources to the privately-run Divine Word University (not even acknowledged by the official Catholic Church as it is run by an offshoot sect), despite the fact that the AusAID representative acknowledged at the time that it 'was no more than a glorified religious TAFE college'.

Then I watched in more despair as national education funds were diverted to the failed and suspect Assemblies of God University at Gerehu and the proposed Lutheran University.

University staff housing is a disgrace. University academic buildings are leaking, rotten and infested with pests. I used to throw pens at the rats as they scuttled across the top of a JK McCarthy painting hanging in my office.

I cannot blame the staff for this, most of whom are hard-working and talented individuals, but when the University's real-value funding has dropped many percent each year over 20 years, what can be done?

It's amazing that it is still hanging on.