Some teachers agree the Qualifications Authority unwittingly made trial NCEA literacy and numeracy tests too difficult last year.

Documents show the Ministry of Education warned the authority that the way the reading, writing and maths tests were designed made them harder for some students.

Those design features included the online nature of the tests, the number of questions, unusual words and contexts that might be unfamiliar to teenagers, especially those from Māori or Pacific backgrounds.

A pilot run in the middle of last year with mostly Year 10 students had pass rates of 34 percent in writing, 56 percent in maths, and 64 percent in reading.

James Cook High School trialled the tests and its principal Grant McMillan says the ministry's criticism was very close to what he and his teachers observed.

"It appeared that NZQA was actually rewriting the curriculum and setting a whole different standard of expectation different to what the ministry actually requires from the curriculum and when we'd been through about the third or fourth digital pilots we were seeing the same things again," he says.

McMillan agreed that the online nature of the exam was unfair for some teenagers.

"The fact that you're a faster typer or not so fast a typer should not be a barrier or a definer to how well my literacy is measured," he says.

McMillan says he was worried the ministry and the Qualifications Authority disagreed over such an important change.

"The sad thing is that there's a disconnect between the agencies and this stuff goes live in about 30 weeks from now when the die is then set. So we don't have long to sort this and that really worries me," he says.

The deputy principal of Hagley College, Marie Stribling, wrote to ministers about the reading and writing tests last year.

She says she was not surprised the ministry identified problems and it was time to abandon the whole exercise.

"The best thing the government could do would be to ditch the tests at this point. I know it's a pretty major move but I think the potential downsides are so major that I think that we really cannot afford for these tests to be implemented next year," Stribling says.

She says high-stakes literacy tests could significantly change the way schools worked, and not for the better.

"For students it's likely to reinforce a failure mindset for students who might already be marginalised. I think it's got the potential for us to return to a situation of streaming which we've worked very hard over recent years to move away from and that will have particular impacts on Māori and Pasifika students, and also I have a fear that it will lead to teachers teaching to the test rather than focusing on what we want teachers to do and that's help students become more literate," she says.

Association of Teachers of English vice-president Pip Tinning says the tests were "pretty solid" but some teachers raised similar fears to the ministry.

"Some of the criticism that I have heard or that we've heard is around some of the language and some of the contexts of the questions and I think that potentially is something that had come through as a criticism and may need some review around who's setting those tests," she says.

Tinning says the tests must fairly assess if young people meet a basic level of literacy and numeracy.

"The language needs to be really accessible at that level and the contexts need to be appropriate for the 2020s. I mean we're 2023 so the contexts need to be really clear if we're asking our young people to access them, it's not a 40-year-old woman in a scarf doing it, it's a teenager."

Tinning says changing the tests would improve results a little, but there would still be a significant problem with writing.

The ministry and NZQA told RNZ they were working together on the tests.

The Qualifications Authority says it had made improvements and it was confident the tests trialled this year would be fair and accurate.

"All the external assessments NZQA develops undergo a rigourous process to ensure they are valid, fair, accurate and fit for purpose. The 2021 and 2022 corequisite assessments have been through a thorough review and evaluation process and areas identified for improvement have been acted on," it says.

"However, there is always room for improvement, and NZQA values both the piloting process and the feedback we receive. This helps us continue to refine assessments and to support the goals of the NCEA Change programme."

- John Gerritsen/RNZ.