NZQA exam outage: Hawke’s Bay schools switch some students to paper exams

Detailed summary

A Hawke’s Bay principal said she was “disappointed” for her students after an outage on NZQA’s online exam platform affected end-of-year exams today. Secondary school students sat…

Hawke's Bay students were forced to use pen and paper for their NCEA Level 2 English after NZQA's digital platform experienced issues on Thursday. Inset: Napier Girls' High School principal Dawn Ackroyd. Photo / Composite

A Hawke’s Bay principal said she was “disappointed” for her students after an outage on NZQA’s online exam platform affected end-of-year exams today.

Secondary school students sat NCEA Level 2 English and Scholarship Chemistry exams in the morning.

An NZQA spokesperson said its digital platform experienced issues transferring student responses from the exam platform to its marking platform overnight, with the problem resolved by 10.35am.

The spokesperson said schools were advised to continue digital exams where students could, and move to paper exams where possible for those who could not.

Derived grades would be available for students unable to complete their exam, or whose performance was impaired by the disruption.

The spokesperson said 1972 students in Hawke’s Bay were entered to sit English Level 2 digitally.

The mother of a Hawke’s Bay student, who asked not to be named, said her child was frustrated waiting for paper exams to be handed out, but students were given an extra 30 minutes to finish the exam.

Napier Girls’ High School principal, chairwoman of the Hawke’s Bay Principals’ Association and regional chairwoman of the Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand, Dawn Ackroyd, said her school’s senior leadership team had photocopied paper copies of the exams for students.

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