NZQA chief fronts up over NCEA English Level 2 exam outage

Detailed summary

The chief executive of the NZ Qualifications Authority has apologised after a digital platform crashed midway through yesterday’s English Level 2 exam - but he couldn’t say it…

The chief executive of the NZ Qualifications Authority has apologised after a digital platform crashed midway through yesterday’s English Level 2 exam.

But pushed on how confident he was in the platform’s stability, chief executive Christian Hawkesby would not say with certainty that the outage wouldn’t reoccur – saying instead that NZQA was working with the provider on testing the platform to ensure it was stable.

Hawkesby told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking Breakfast that NZQA was sorry for the disruption to students, and recognised it was a very stressful time for students and their parents.

“We identified an issue during the exam, we worked with our vendor to identify it and resolve it as quickly as we could.

“The system is back up and running and stable and we had exams through yesterday afternoon.”

There were no exams today, but the largest exam was scheduled next Tuesday and NZQA was preparing for that.

Paper copies were available for that exam “to give comfort for students” that there was a contingency in place, he said.

Speaking to Herald Now’s Ryan Bridge TODAY, Hawkesby admitted NZQA still didn’t know how many students had to abandon the exam altogether, but the glitch may have affected up to 37,500 students – the number who were registered on the digital system.

The Herald was told yesterday that students were left panicked and some were in tears after their work was wiped.

Opening of the article, excerpted from NZ Herald. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.