Anxious morning for students awaiting exam results
Teens throughout Manawatu¯ spent a morning nervously awaiting the results of a year of hard work.
The NCEA exam results of almost 168,000 students went up online yesterday. Across the Manawatu¯-whanganui region, 7605 teens were registered to sit last year’s end-of-year exams, with 305 also sitting scholarship exams.
Palmerston North Boys’ High School student Flyn Yates 17, was considering celebrating with nachos after finding he passed all six of his year 12 subjects. He checked his results as soon as he got up in the morning and found ‘‘they went quite good’’.
It was a good pay off for the hard work he put in, he said.
‘‘I had to put in quite an effort for some quite hard subjects. I just had to sit down and nail it out, and plan and make sure I was ticking it all off.
‘‘Physics was my hardest this year. But I really liked it. That was my favourite.’’
Yates had no complaints about the way NCEA assessments were carried out and said he liked the combination of internal and external assessments.
Last year, he juggled a commerce class trip to the United States, a First XV tour of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and his schoolwork.
‘‘You try to keep everything balanced. After the rugby season, everything calms down a bit, so it went really well.’’
For those entering year 12 this year, he said: ‘‘I found level 2 a big step up. Be wary of the change’’.
Social media was flodded with people sharing their reactions to their results, he said.
‘‘Everyone was posting stuff up.’’
Zac Maskill checked his results from a bach in Whangarei and was among those celebrating.
After being unsure if he passed, he found he had done ‘‘a bit better than I thought – most were merits, with a couple of excellents’’. He was ‘‘stoked and over the moon.’’
Last year, he was in year 10 at Palmerston North Boys’ High School, but sat exams for five year 11 level 1 subjects – maths, science, history, geography, commerce. He also took year 10 English and music.
‘‘Doing exams was really confusing and that does add to the pressure. The first time, you don’t really know what’s going on. Next time, I’m going to be a little bit more confident.
‘‘If I could go back I would have done a bit of study at the end of every week, and revised that week’s material through the year.’’
Dannevirke High School 2017 prefect Rachel Aitau-whyte sat two NCEA exams, because she had earned enough credits to pass from just internal assessments.
Having the flexibility to opt out of exams meant you could concentrate more on the remaining topics, she said.
‘‘I wasn’t really worried about my results, because I only had two exams.’’
She was in no hurry to check the results and had decided to sleep in, but got bombarded with early morning text messages.
It wasn’t just the students feeling nerves yesterday morning. Waiopehu College principal Mark Robinson admitted to an early check of the school’s raw-results data.
‘‘We’ve been just as nervous as the students, but it’s looking good.
‘‘And I’ve already had students emailing me saying: ‘I’ve got excellence’. It’s nice that the kids will celebrate that with us. It’s lovely to get those messages.’’