Scholarship results out today

An anxious wait will come to an end today for more than 7000 of the country’s top students as they find out whether they’ve secured scholarship awards.

Students who sat scholarship exams last November will be able to check their results this morning, by logging into their personal learning portal on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) website.

It comes three weeks after students found out their NCEA Levels 1, 2 and 3 results.

Today, 7500 students — deemed some of the smartest in their year — will find out whether they secured a scholarship award for tertiary study.

Students sitting New Zealand Scholarship are assessed on their ability to demonstrate high-level critical thinking, abstraction, and generalisation.

The tests are designed to be challenging, “and are demanding for the most able candidates in each subject”, NZQA said.

“Successful students are those who can also integrate, synthesise, and apply knowledge, skills, understanding and ideas to complex situations.”

Results will be available online, and the NZQA call centre will open at 8am for students with any questions about their results or who Get your results Contact the NZQA Call Centre between 8am-5pm on 0800 697 296. Go online to nzqa.govt.nz are having problems logging in.

Among those waiting for their results will be students who sat a controversial scholarship statistics exam which contained a table with information that did not appear in related scattergraph plots.

The mistake would not have affected students’ ability to answer the question, NZQA said when the Herald revealed the mistake in November.

Meanwhile, an investigation into the botched Level 3 statistics exam, which contained an impossible-toanswer question, is ongoing.

Other scholarship students were disrupted by the Kaikoura earthquake, which struck in the early hours of the first full day of the exam season.

History and chemistry scholarship students were the only NCEA pupils to have their exams cancelled following the 7.8 magnitude quake, which rocked much of the country and devastated large swathes of North Canterbury.

But amid a swell of confusion a number of schools began to sit the history scholarship before realising it had been cancelled, meaning some students were pulled out midway through sitting the exam. Others sat the full exam, only learning afterwards that it had been cancelled.

At the time, NZQA said pupils who sat the exam would be marked on the test they completed, while those who did not sit it or only answered some of the questions before it was cancelled would sit a new exam, with a fresh paper written up.

Results for NCEA Levels 1, 2 and 3 were released on January 17. The NZQA website struggled to cope with demand, as 25,000 students logged in every hour to view their results.

Marked exam papers were expected to be returned by midFebruary, NZQA said.