NZQA technical glitch disrupts New Zealand NCEA Level 2 English exam

A technical problem disrupted New Zealand's NCEA Level 2 English examination on Thursday morning, leaving some students unable to log in to the digital exam platform and raising concerns among teachers about the impact on candidates.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) acknowledged the disruption on its website, initially posting a message that it was working to resolve an issue with the digital examination platform. A subsequent update indicated that the platform's performance had improved.

Schools were advised to allow students who could access the system to continue with their digital examinations, while those unable to do so were to be moved to paper-based assessments wherever possible. "We recognise this may not be possible in every situation. Derived grades at scale will be available for students who are unable to complete their exam," NZQA said in its notice.

Teachers contacted RNZ to report that students were struggling to log in, with one describing the situation as "a nightmare".

NZQA later clarified that the disruption was linked to a problem with the overnight transfer of student responses from the examination platform to its marking system. The authority confirmed that the issue had been resolved at 10.35am, adding that students would have access to derived grades if they were unable to complete their examinations or if their performance had been affected by the technical failure.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said she had been briefed by NZQA as soon as the authority became aware of the problem. "I understand this was an isolated incident and that NZQA have identified the cause of the outage and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again. All students were given additional time to complete the exam," she said.