Relief as NCEA results arrive

Nervousness turned into euphoria in a matter of seconds for Josh Mead yesterday.

‘‘All the stress plonked on me at once,’’ the school leaver said, describing the moment he logged on to the NZQA website about 7.30am to discover the outcome of his end-of-year National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) exams.

He had nothing to worry about. The former Nelson College student passed with excellence, securing his spot at the University of Canterbury to study engineering.

‘‘It’s a weight off my shoulders,’’ Mead said as he headed out to celebrate with friends.

He was glad he didn’t have to wait long to find out how he had done. ‘‘Being able to get my results straight away was definitely better than waiting for my papers to come in the mail,’’ he said. ‘‘Universities require . . . time for confirmation on halls and scholarships.’’

Natania Ngawhau, 18, also logged on to the NZQA site as soon as she got out of bed yesterday morning.

‘‘I looked at it for quite a while . . . I had to make sure.’’

The Nayland College student was ‘‘very surprised’’, excited and relieved to learn that she had passed NCEA level 2 with excellence, as well as level 3 music.

Ngawhau was a year 12 student last year. It was only her second year at school, having been homeschooled before then.

‘‘I can stop holding my breath,’’ said Ngawhau, who had been on tenterhooks since the exams finished in November.

In contrast to the ‘‘hiccups’’ she encountered while accessing her results online last year, there was no such delay this year, she said.

Meanwhile, the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT) said applications had been slightly higher this year, but current enrolments were slightly lower.

Chief executive Liam Sloan said he expected a hike in acceptance of offers over the next week.

‘‘Our teams of business support colleagues are ringing around students, who had places confirmed, or conditional offers . . . saying to them on a one-on-one basis, ‘Are you securing your application?’.

‘‘Based on the current climate, we’re starting to look at numbers much earlier, and trying to encourage people to make their decisions sooner rather than allowing them to wait until the last minute.’’

A more formal ‘‘clearing system’’ would be of benefit to both the vocational education sector and prospective students, Sloan suggested.

In Britain, students who don’t get the grades they need for their chosen university course can find places through a clearing service, run by admissions service UCAS, which publishes course vacancies.

‘‘Next year we will look to have something happening on the NCEA results day, where people can come in and talk about their results,’’ Sloan said.

There would be ‘‘a number of interventions’’ ahead of an open day at NMIT on January 29, he said, including stalls at Nelson’s Saturday Market, and an online ‘‘chat bot’’, through which staff could answer questions.

Sloan encouraged people to go into NMIT’s information and enrolment centre to discuss education and training options.

New Zealand’s 16 institutes of technology and polytechnics will be merged as a single entity in April.

Sloan said he supported the idea of a national clearing system.

He said NMIT was aiming for 2879 enrolments overall for 2020, 14 fewer equivalent fulltime students than last year.

‘‘Being able to get my results straight away was definitely better than waiting for my papers to come in the mail.’’ Josh Mead,

Nelson College leaver