Students who sat Thursday's NCEA Level 2 English exam at a school with digital entries will be offered a derived grade, after the New Zealand Qualifications Authority's online exam platform failed partway through the morning.
NZQA said on 12 November that those students' exam work will still be marked, and each student will receive whichever is higher: the exam result or the derived grade. It said it would also work with schools on individual cases where students were particularly affected.
What went wrong?
The exam started at 9.30am. NZQA told RNZ the problem was "related to the transfer of student responses from the exam platform to our marking platform overnight", and that it was resolved at 10.35am.
In that time some students could not log in, while others found the system slow or lost work. An exam supervisor told RNZ the network "started to go down" about 15 minutes into the exam. One student said her work appeared to disappear when she tried to finish and close the exam. Others were moved to paper partway through.
Christchurch Boys' High School told parents that NZQA does not give schools paper copies of digital exams, so staff had to print papers during the exam. Students there were given extra time to make up what they lost.
Level 2 English is the largest NCEA exam, with about 40,000 candidates, RNZ reported. It is not clear how many were sitting it online.
What is a derived grade?
A derived grade is a grade worked out from other evidence of what a student can do, usually their school's practice exam (often called mock or derived grade exams) sat earlier in the year. Schools submit that evidence to NZQA.
NZQA deputy chief executive Jann Marshall told RNZ that students' practice exam results would be compared with their work from Thursday, "and they will be given the higher result".
That means a student who did badly because of the glitch should not end up with a lower grade than their practice exam supports. A student who managed to finish and did well on the day keeps that result.
Does my child need to apply?
NZQA's statement says students who attended the exam at schools with digital entries "will be eligible". It does not say students need to apply. Schools are working through how to handle derived grades at this scale, and Christchurch Boys' High told families to wait for advice from the school before taking any action.
Things worth doing now:
- Ask your child what happened. Did they log in? Did they lose work, switch to paper, or get extra time? Write it down while it is fresh.
- Check with the school's principal's nominee. This is the staff member who handles NCEA exams and derived grade applications. Ask whether your child is on the school's list of affected students.
- Check the practice exam result. The derived grade depends on it, so it helps to know what result the school has on record.
- Look out for school emails in the coming days, especially if your child was particularly affected and the school is raising their case with NZQA.
If your child sat the exam on paper from the start, they were not using the digital platform. Schools can confirm whether the derived grade offer covers them.
What about other exams?
There are no NCEA exams on Friday 13 November because of Canterbury Anniversary Day. NZQA said it is using that time to do more work on the digital platform and find out what happened before exams resume. Marshall told RNZ the vendor had assured NZQA the problems would not happen again and that the system would be "completely" retested.
The exam period runs until 4 December, 1News reported, with 127 NCEA and Scholarship exam sessions this year. Our earlier guide covers what students need to bring and what to do if they are sick on the day.
Thursday's failure is not the first. In 2023 hundreds of students could not log into the Level 1 English exam, and in 2019 nearly 1100 students lost their connection to the exam server, RNZ reported.
What are teachers and the minister saying?
Teachers told RNZ the failure was "an unacceptable debacle" and "a bit of a nightmare". Steve McCracken, chair of the Post Primary Teachers' Association's Secondary Principals' Council, said questions had to be asked about how it happened.
Marshall said NZQA was sorry. "It's unacceptable," she told RNZ.
Education Minister Erica Stanford told RNZ she had been briefed and understood it was an isolated incident with an identified cause. She said she would meet NZQA to make sure no student was disadvantaged.
